Submitted by Smoking Gun

Interflora's Great British Bloom Off

Smoking Gun built an Instagram-first IGTV competition series for Interflora that put its florists on camera and reports 3.8 million video views across the campaign.

5% follower growthfollower growth
9.4 million organic impressionsorganic impressions
946,000 total playthroughstotal playthroughs
...90% above the targetvideo views versus target
3.8 million video viewsvideo views

Case in 60 seconds

Interflora needed to be more relevant to a younger audience while its own in-house research showed the brand read as old-fashioned, so any fix had to court new consumers without alienating the older customers already established.

The campaign appears to turn on the florists themselves being the unused asset, because Florist Choice already hands individual florists creative discretion over each bouquet, which gives a delivery brand personalities and craft to show rather than product to advertise.

Rather than advertise Florist Choice, Smoking Gun turned the product's premise into a competition format, The Great British Bloom Off, built as an IGTV series so the brand's relevance case was made through entertainment.

Florists competed across four weekly stages on IGTV, with audiences voting through a People's Choice mechanic after each episode, and Simon Lycett, Eva Sonaike and Karen Barnes serving as influencers, judges and faces of the show. Smoking Gun handled filming and logistics in a single day, including photography for further content.

Smoking Gun reports 3.8 million video views, described as 90% above the target, with 9.4 million organic impressions, 946,000 total playthroughs and 5% follower growth, plus CIPR, Creative Moment and PRmoment awards.

Strategy Breakdown

The primary strategy-learning section — interpretation, not a press-release summary.

Younger consumers the brand wanted to engage on Instagram, reached without alienating its older established audiences.
The work sits against the familiarity of the televised amateur competition format, which the title borrows, so a flower delivery brand could enter entertainment on terms audiences already understood rather than asking them to learn a new one.
Flower delivery is bought occasionally and judged on the finished bouquet, so the craft and the people behind it stay invisible; the page frames this as a brand read as old-fashioned by its own research.
Interflora acts as host and stage for its own florist network rather than as advertiser, with Florist Choice serving as the competitive premise that made the series possible.
Based on the available evidence, the campaign assumes younger audiences will follow a personality-led contest they can vote on, because participation and weekly return are what convert passive views into acquisition and loyalty.

Creative & Execution System

Assets & channels

  • IGTV
  • Instagram

Partners

  • Smoking Gun (lead_agency)

Participation mechanic

  • A People's Choice mechanic through which the social audience voted for its favourite florist after each weekly episode.

Creator role

  • Eva Sonaike — creator
  • Karen Barnes — creator
  • Simon Lycett — creator

Results & Evidence

MetricValueResult type
follower growth5% follower growthperformance
organic impressions9.4 million organic impressionsimpressions
total playthroughs946,000 total playthroughsperformance
video views versus target...90% above the targetperformance
video views3.8 million video viewsvideo_views

Why Smoking Gun's strategy worked

  1. 1

    A product feature that already grants people creative discretion can carry a series format, because the variation the feature produces supplies the episode-to-episode difference a competition needs without invented conflict.

  2. 2

    Voting after each weekly episode gives an audience a reason to return rather than to watch once, which reads as the mechanism behind playthrough and follower figures sitting alongside raw view counts.

  3. 3

    Casting recognised specialists as judges lets a brand borrow category authority while keeping its own staff at the centre of the story, so the influencer role supports the brand's people rather than replacing them.

  4. 4

    Compressing a four-episode series into one shooting day suggests episodic social content can be produced at series scale on a single production footprint, which lowers the cost of committing to a weekly format.

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