At last year’s Grammy Awards, singer Pharrell Williams wore such an outlandish hat—a cross between Smokey the Bear’s forest-brown lid and The Sorting Hat at Gryffindor—that it quickly received its own Twitter account.
Then some marketing genius at Arby’s, whose corporate logo is a hat of similar design, hit it out of the ballpark. The roast beef chain tweeted Williams a message during the live broadcast: “Hey @pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs.”
Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs
— Arby’s (@Arbys) January 27, 2014
By the next morning, the tweet garnered 75,000 retweets, more than 40,000 favorites, and high-profile media coverage. Williams later auctioned off the hat for charity, which Arby’s won with a $44,000 bid…
