The Pony

Why it works

On a windswept Shetland hillside a stocky little pony called Socks moonwalks and tosses his mane to Fleetwood Mac's “Everywhere”. Wieden+Kennedy London built the spot on an insight about mobile data: the silly clips people send one another are how they stay close, so Three, the UK's fourth network, would stand up for the internet's silliest stuff. Dougal Wilson directed the 60- and 30-second films, and a “Pony Mixer” on YouTube let viewers re-score the dance and send it to friends, with favourite fan versions later broadcast on TV. It is studied as a template for a television ad engineered to be shared: W+K reports 1.5 million YouTube views on the launch weekend, 190,000 tweets using #DancePonyDance during the campaign and a 67 per cent rise in positive sentiment, and Three's finance director later claimed it beat O2's rival campaign on views at half the media and production spend.