Last year, Mars created a world-first in student engagement with its magical tweet-activated vending machine. This year it took things to a whole other level with Mars Hide and Tweet.

TweetShop was creative, massively effective and totally ground-breaking (in the recruitment world at least). Over 21 days, it went out to eight campuses and nearly 2,000 people grabbed the chance to tweet for treats.

This year Mars wanted to increase that reach but budget meant we couldn’t transport TweetShop to more locations. So we created an online hide and seek game using Google Maps technology.

#MarsHideAndTweet happened in two distinct phases. First, a week-long online competition that was open to universities across the UK. We hid the TweetShop in five different European cities on our custom map over a period of five days. And every day students raced to hunt it down following a series of cryptic clues that were tweeted over the course of the day.

We went out onto 9 campuses to build excitement face-to-face with students and promote the competition with motion-sensitive plasma TV screens that projected a series of different messages as people walked past them. In the week running up to the competition we began sparking twitter conversations with a series of innovative vines.

Emails, posters and flyers, as well as posts to the Marsgradsuk Facebook and Twitter pages, were used to explain what #MarsHideAndTweet was all about and to promote the competition.

Did it work? Absolutely.

More than 350 people registered to play. And within minutes of the competition going live on Monday 3rd February the guesses began coming in, even before the first clue had been tweeted. The race was on because the first person each day to find and tweet TweetShop’s location to @marsgradsuk won a free weekend break for two people to that day’s city.
A dedicated team responded to those guesses with hundreds of personal tweets back to players. The conversations and the excitement grew and grew.

On top of daily competitions there was the main event, the opportunity for one university to win TweetShop, fully-loaded with Mars freebies, for its campus for a week.

The winner would be the university whose students made the most tweets over the course of the week. The competition was fierce and so close that in the end there was nothing between Coventry and Reading so a decision was made to send TweetShop out to both universities. Win, win – in true Mars make it mean more style.