For the past few weeks, everyone in the advertising and tech community has been buzzing about the newly launched social application (of the moment) Vine. It’s pretty ingenious in that it allows the user to capture six seconds of video using his or her iPhone. Why six seconds? Well, it’s fast enough to avoid slow loading on mobile networks and quick enough to hold your attention.

A week or so before Valentine’s Day, Mashable and USA Today promoted to their substantial Twitter audiences the idea of creating “Valenvine” videos and sharing them via the hashtag “Valenvine.” It sounded like the perfect opportunity to unleash our brand of experimentation on the world.

What if we hijacked that traffic? Could we again demonstrate our agency’s belief that social media is much more effective when an actual creative concept is incorporated into its usage?

So we created Valenvine.com, where visitors could request Valenvine videos for themselves or a loved one from our “in-house Cupid.” Vine (is owned by and) works through Twitter, so all requests came in to Red Square’s Twitter response feed. Once we got a request, our team of producers, writers and PR people crafted the message and posted it to Vine in real time. As we created the videos, they were all aggregated on our Valenvine website. All requests and videos were tagged with #Valenvine, which again was the hashtag promoted by major media outlets for the day.

We started on Wednesday night before Valentine’s Day (in order to practice and build a little steam), and once we began the next morning, things got moving very quickly. After an hour or so, requests started coming in at such a high volume that we couldn’t keep up. By mid-day, a social traffic reporting site noted that our Valenvine site was ranking third behind Mashable and USA Today in terms of Valentine-related traffic. Some of the videos were odd, some were sweet and others were really funny.

By the end of the day (we were exhausted), we had created 178 personalized videos (almost 18 minutes of content), reached approximately 600,000 Twitter users and scored over one million impressions. MediaBistro wrote about “How One Company Used #ValenVines to Win Twitter Today.”

Kind of amazing.

We learned what resources are needed to pull a social stunt, as well as what works and what doesn’t. Our team also found that paid advertising was fruitless in the effort, which illustrates this type of “campaign” is super fast and purely social.

Above all, Valenvine demonstrates that audiences are shifting to digital/social media at a faster rate than most advertisers are adapting. It’s our job to show our clients how to prepare, how to staff and how to communicate and be responsive in a world that demands brilliance 24/7.