D’Italiano had recently gone back to its Italian roots with the “Live Large” campaign, and wanted to reinforce this new positioning and connect with a younger, millennial target in a meaningful way.

The brand knew that the target over-indexes on their usage of social media and online video, and that was the key to reaching them.

The idea was to dramatize the ways that people can bring the passion of Italy to the everyday by taking over the YouTube Masthead for a day and having real Italian tenors sing their Tweets live. For one day, on June 14, people could submit a Tweet about bread or how they live large using #livelargetweets – either from the banner or directly on Twitter. One of the tenors would then sing this Tweet in opera.

A social team created Tweet videos to respond to the people who had submitted them. Even if people didn’t want to participate, they could still experience the joy of seeing all these Tweets sung live, and take away the brand’s core message.

The largest challenge was working seamlessly with Google and Twitter to make sure there were as few barriers to participation as possible. It was important for the team to be responsive and quick – weeding out inappropriate Tweets and responding to people by Tweeting back videos. Not an easy feat, considering this was a live event where anything could happen.

Overall, the activation resulted in 33 million impressions, and more than five million unique impressions. We got approximately two submissions per minute, and users spent 24,893 hours watching the broadcast.

Plus, the online comments were overwhelmingly positive, and even Google Canada called it “one of the most clever uses of Live Streaming in a Masthead to date”.