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M6 Mobile Turned Twitter Into a Cat-Feeding Game with Geronimo
M6 mobile's #EatATweet campaign is a Twitter-based interactive game launched in France in May 2013, created by Blast Radius Paris, in which users fed tweets bearing the hashtag #EatATweet to Geronimo — a purple LOLcat character — competing to trigger a follower-generating explosion mechanic.
The campaign operated through a dedicated digital destination at eatatweet.fr. Users connected their Twitter accounts, posted a message using the hashtag #EatATweet, and released an animated blue bird into Geronimo's path. Each tweet caused the cat to grow progressively larger, escalating the game's absurdity with each participation cycle. The participant whose tweet triggered Geronimo's eventual explosion became the winner; in that moment, every preceding player automatically tweeted about the winner, generating a cascading surge in followers. The mechanic made follower acquisition a direct, legible reward rather than a passive byproduct of engagement.
The campaign was developed in collaboration with Am I Collective, a group of illustrators and developers credited with bringing Geronimo and his animated universe to life. In France, where M6 mobile had built its brand positioning around the idea of recognisable social identity — captured in the tagline 'Be the one to follow' — the game translated that brand promise into a literal, participatory outcome. The social media marketing mechanics were inseparable from the brand message: tweeting more produced more visibility, and visibility produced followers. Blast Radius Paris structured the entire experience so that the platform's native currency, the tweet, became both the gameplay unit and the brand touchpoint. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting its originality within the conventions of promotional Twitter campaigns of its era.
M6 mobile operated in a French telecommunications market defined by intense price competition and rapid subscriber growth among newer entrants. France had approximately 74 million mobile customers at the end of 2013, according to En Wikipedia. The four principal network operators — Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom, and Free Mobile — held 65.9 million SIM cards between them, representing 89.1 percent of that market at the close of 2013, according to engadget.com. Free Mobile, which entered the French market as the fourth network operator in January 2012 according to phys.org, reached approximately 8 million customers — around 12 percent of the French market — by the end of 2013, according to en.wikipedia.org, demonstrating how quickly challenger brands were acquiring subscribers through aggressive pricing.
Against this landscape, Bouygues Telecom reported 11.1 million customers and approximately 15 percent market share at year-end 2013, according to en.wikipedia.org, illustrating the scale gap between established operators and the virtual operators, or MVNOs, competing below them. M6 mobile, operating as an MVNO rather than a network operator, could not compete on infrastructure or price alone. The brand's strategic response was to compete on personality and social currency. The positioning — 'Be the one to follow' — framed M6 mobile customers not as subscribers but as cultural figures worth following, aligning the telecom brand with the logic of social media identity.
The choice of Twitter as the platform for the #EatATweet social media marketing campaign in 2013 was deliberate. Twitter's follower count was a publicly visible status signal, and the campaign's explosion mechanic converted that signal into a competitive incentive. By selecting the LOLcat as its central creative device — a format native to early internet culture — Blast Radius Paris anchored the campaign in a visual language that French digital audiences already understood and shared organically, according to llllitl.fr.
Blast Radius Paris built the #EatATweet campaign around a single character. Geronimo, a purple cat with an appetite for Twitter's blue birds, served as the campaign's emotional and comedic engine. The creative logic was elegant: Twitter's bird mascot, already a cultural shorthand for the platform itself, became literal prey. The cat-eats-bird premise gave the campaign a self-aware quality that distinguished it from the promotional Twitter campaigns of its era, which more typically relied on retweet mechanics or prize draws.
The creative team at Blast Radius Paris was led by Creative Director Benjamin Bregeault, with Art Director Charles-Antoine De Sousa shaping the visual system and copywriters Charles Barbillon and Joris Tripier-Mondancin responsible for the campaign's tone. Development and illustration were executed by Am I Collective, described in campaign documentation as a collaborative group of illustrators whose work defined Geronimo's visual universe. Am I Collective produced multiple animated episode variants for the campaign, including parody sequences such as Cat Vador, Cat-lem Shake, and an 8-bit video-game-style episode, each offering a distinct visual interpretation of Geronimo consuming a bird. These episodes gave repeat visitors a reason to return and extended the campaign's shareability beyond the core game mechanic.
The escalation design — in which Geronimo visibly expanded with each feeding — introduced a progress indicator that made the collective nature of the game legible in real time. Players could see the cumulative weight of all previous tweets rendered on screen, giving each individual action a sense of contribution to a shared, mounting outcome. The explosion moment, when it arrived, was earned by the community and awarded to one participant — a structure that balanced individual incentive with collective play. The campaign's hashtag, #EatATweet, was both a call to action and a descriptive label, reducing the participation barrier to a single memorable phrase.
The #EatATweet campaign received formal industry recognition at the Cristal Festival 2013, where it earned a Sapphire award in the Telecom category. The Cristal Festival, held annually in France, represents one of the country's most prominent creative advertising awards, and recognition in the Telecom category placed the campaign among the most creatively distinguished telecom executions of that year. The award validated the structural ambition of the campaign — its attempt to make follower acquisition a designed outcome rather than an incidental one.
No independently verified performance data for #EatATweet — including total participant numbers, hashtag volume, or follower uplift figures — is publicly available. What the campaign's architecture does reveal, however, is a measurable structural logic. The explosion mechanic created a compounding amplification loop: every player who had participated before the winning tweet was automatically enrolled as an amplifier of that winner's profile. The larger the player pool before detonation, the greater the follower reward for the winner. This design meant the campaign's effectiveness scaled directly with participation volume — a self-reinforcing dynamic that gave M6 mobile an incentive to drive as many users to eatatweet.fr as possible before any single explosion cycle resolved.
In the context of French social media marketing in 2013, this mechanic represented a meaningful structural departure from the standard promoted hashtag or sweepstake format. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects both the originality of that departure and the constraints of a campaign whose long-term cultural footprint remained limited to its award recognition and the memories of its participants.
#EatATweet was a Twitter-based interactive game launched in France in May 2013 by M6 mobile and Blast Radius Paris. Users posted with the hashtag #EatATweet to feed animated blue birds to Geronimo, a purple LOLcat character, competing to trigger an explosion that rewarded the winning participant with a mass follower surge from all previous players.
Blast Radius Paris created the #EatATweet campaign for M6 mobile. Creative Director Benjamin Bregeault led the team, with Art Director Charles-Antoine De Sousa and copywriters Charles Barbillon and Joris Tripier-Mondancin. Am I Collective handled illustration and development, producing Geronimo's animated episodes including Cat Vador and Cat-lem Shake.
Users visited eatatweet.fr, connected their Twitter account, and posted using the hashtag #EatATweet to release a virtual blue bird. Each tweet made the purple cat Geronimo grow larger. The participant whose tweet caused Geronimo to explode won the round, triggering all previous players to automatically tweet about that winner, generating new followers.
The #EatATweet campaign won a Sapphire award at the Cristal Festival 2013 in the Telecom category. The Cristal Festival is one of France's most prominent creative advertising award competitions. The recognition placed the Blast Radius Paris campaign among the most distinguished telecom creative executions in France that year.
Geronimo is the purple LOLcat character created by Am I Collective for the #EatATweet campaign. He served as the interactive centrepiece of the Twitter game, consuming blue birds submitted by users via the hashtag. His animated episodes — including Cat Vador and an 8-bit game parody — gave the 2013 France campaign its distinctive offbeat visual identity.
M6 mobile's brand positioning during the 2013 #EatATweet campaign was 'Be the one to follow.' The tagline framed customers as figures worth following on social media, aligning the brand's identity with Twitter's native logic. The campaign's follower-acquisition mechanic translated that positioning into a direct, playable outcome rather than an abstract brand promise.
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