Twitter is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
The 2010s were the heyday of 'Retweet to win' competitions. They were everywhere, until the 'Quote RT' button got more popular and we all lost interest. Ah, those were the days. If you got lucky (and clicked the RT button before the promo ended), yours might well be the Twitter username pulled out of a hat.
Barnstaple agency TheBigCreative had yet to get lucky. So they decided to create their own contest, with an unusual prize:
I saw this tweet, and I instantly wanted that sock. Size, colour, pattern and general quality be damned, a free sock is a free sock. As you can see from the old-school Twitter screenshot above, I wasted little time in putting my own RT into the imaginary hat.
Full disclosure: I'd never won an RT competition before, either. I got some fridge magnets off the creative agency LOVE for writing a Christmas haiku thing, and Kleenex once sent me a care package because I was tweeting about the sniffles. But RT comps have long been the elusive unwinnables.
The waiting game began. It's not a game I'm any good at.
Thankfully, the folks at TheBigCreative also know how it feels to be impatient.
If I win. IF I win. Ha. I had Funny Women and an increasing level of Twitter camaraderie on my side. That sock was as good as mine.
Or was it?
Doubt started to creep in. The retweets doubled - from 2 to 4 - and suddenly that victory wasn't looking so certain. Missing out again would've been a crushing blow.
I did worry about it for a while. Which is why I reacted like this when they officially announced the winner:
I then had to awkwardly DM TheBigCreative and ask if they were genuinely going to award me the sock. They were kind enough to say 'yes'.
That's an important bit to highlight. They said 'yes'... but they didn't have to. From the start, this competition was a joke. They didn't have to announce a winner at all. They didn't have to make good on the sock. I'm just happy they did.
So there was definitely a sock en route. I didn't have long to wait until a mysteriously light and thin package arrived in the post.
I'd been warned that the sock might not fit me, but at the same time assured that it would definitely be clean. This is... a much smaller sock than I expected. It fits like a glove, which is weird for a sock but that's the phrase we use. I think someone's been sneaky and chosen a Kady-sized sock. Which is such a nice gesture!
(I wonder who's got the other one.)
Does it look more like a left sock or a right sock? I should've held a Twitter poll on that one, but I never got around to it...
Thank you, lovely people at TheBigCreative. You made a cynical copywriter very happy.