The Trig Challenge: Ordnance Survey

The challenge

Ordnance Survey's audience was getting older every year, and OS Maps needed people who spend more time on TikTok than in the countryside.

That audience doesn't like being told what to do, and they can smell a brand trying too hard from a mile off.

So the brief was to give them a reason to actually go outside.

The idea

Turn 6,500 forgotten concrete pillars into a nationwide treasure hunt.

Trig pillars are the four-foot obelisks OS started planting across Britain in the 1930s to map the country by triangulation. They stopped being used in the sixties. Thousands of them are still out there, and every OS map marks them with a small blue triangle.

So every Saturday in August we went live from one of them, location unknown. Clues came out across the morning. First person to find the pillar and shout Touch Grass at the camera won £1,000.

There was no entry form and no app to download, you just had to get there first.

Touch Grass, the Trig Point Challenge: first to shout Touch Grass at the secret trig point wins £1,000

A trig pillar standing in the landscape on location

The work

We did four Saturdays at four mystery pillars, live on Instagram, TikTok and Twitch, presented by Max Khadar.

I worked out where they'd be before I worked out anything else. The pillars had to cover a range of difficulty, sit near towns and cities, spread evenly across the country, and (the one I cared most about) be reachable by people who don't drive. Plenty of the people we wanted don't drive, so a pillar you could only reach by car would have shut them out.

The rig had to be almost invisible: a phone on a tripod, an iPad running a timer, a different activity at each site, and a flare for when someone won. If it looked like a film crew, anyone walking past would have worked out what was going on.

Presenter Max Khadar on the live feed, with the chat underneath

Max on the stream

The livestream rig being tested behind the scenes

The rig

The live chat

Each week fed into the next. Teasers hinted at the location before we went live, clues came out as people got closer, and the highlights and winners' reactions kept it going into the next weekend.

The hardest part was making the waiting watchable. A livestream from a windy hillside dies if nothing happens, and nobody knew if it'd take ten minutes or four hours. We kept it moving with fresh clues and stuff happening on camera.

I came up with it and ran it from start to finish with a videographer and a producer, from the format and logistics to working out how to broadcast live from the middle of nowhere. I travelled to every location to film, and cut it all together, teasers included.

The results

Someone won every weekend, usually within five to thirty minutes.

That's the number I care about. If a pillar gets found in five minutes, people were watching the stream and running out the door.

Four pillars found. About 6,496 left.

Week one winner, Mark, at Hollingbury Hill

Week three winner, Umair, at Stapleford Hill

The winner getting the confetti and the prize

The payoff

It also showed that a mapping service founded in 1791 could run something live and chaotic on Twitch and TikTok, and that people would get out of bed on a Saturday to chase it.

After that came the Touch Grass Weekender and the podcast ads. The wider Touch Grass campaign went on to win Best Small Marketing Campaign at the UK Agency Awards.