In March this year, Widget Dude (real name, Kevin Blandford) won a free holiday in paradise – or as we call it, Puerto Rico. Sadly, there was a rider. It was a holiday for one – no wife, no bub.

Maybe you think that IS a holiday in paradise? Dude didn’t. He reckoned that he “didn’t have a single second of fun.” And to prove it, he documented his misery in a series of photos that he uploaded to Reddit.

Dude’s holiday album went viral.

…which meant that the adpeople at J. Walter Thompson Puerto Rico saw it. They also saw an opportunity, and proposed to Compañía de Turismo de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Tourism Agency) that it remake the trip for Dude…but better. 

So, two weeks after the original post, Widget Dude went back to Puerto Rico, this time with his wife and his daughter, but still free of charge. Puerto Rico Tourism took them all back to the places he had visited by himself and retook all of his pictures.

The new set was clearly happier. Dude then uploaded the new pictures back to Reddit and in a matter of hours they went all the way up to the top of the front page. Events like that tend to attract worldwide attention. This event did. Sure, some of the Reddit chatter was cynical – even scornful – of the obvious marketing ploy. But, in social media, you have to take a bit of bad with your good, to keep a conversation buzzing.

The idea was big. Its execution was (almost) immediate. The result was huge. The moral: The quick brown fox is easy to remember.

Or as Jaime Rosado, chief creative officer for Puerto Rico and Latin America at J. Walter Thompson, puts it, “Today brands must be constantly listening to the conversations online, in the social channels, and find creative and relevant ways to engage with their audience. The biggest challenge is the speed of response, the speed of action, because you have to create and execute the idea while the conversation outside is still ongoing.”