By Rebecca Bennett
The annual Digiday Content Marketing Awards are right around the corner. They honor the best creative marketing and advertising being done today by brands, agencies, publishers and platforms. The awards aim to highlight the media and marketing industry’s best campaigns, creatives and advertisers who drive the brightest ideas and lead innovation to push the industry to new levels. There is something to be learned from every campaign. Take a look at how these three campaigns built their strategy to earn themselves a nomination for Best Use of Facebook.
Campaign: GUESS Europe Creates ‘Denim Day’ to Fight Violence Against Women
Goal: Brand Awareness
Campaign Length: 2 weeks in May (Think Mother’s Day)
Tools:
- Brand Networks
Audience: Advocates who want to fight violence against women and denim lovers
Strategy:
1) Drive awareness – Serve ads through Facebook
- Used creative and targeting combinations via Facebook and Brand Networks tools, which allowed them to create multiple optimization metrics and set clear cost per acquisition goals.
- Created Lookalike Audiences that were very similar to Guess Europe’s existing targeting of advocates for the cause.
- Utilized different ad formats
o Ads
o Video
o Desktop News Feed
- Facebook Marketing Partners (Brand Networks)
2) Engagement – Ask audience to pledge to wear jeans on Denim Day
3) Validate participation and promote next year’s campaign – Display pictures of participating celebrities
What Success Looks Like:
Campaign: Onion Labs & Intel create the ‘Dr. Jimm’ Show to Motivate PC Upgrading
Goal: Get young people to upgrade to new PCs (HP, Intel, Dell, and Lenovo, Microsoft)
Campaign Length: Several weeks across Nov and Dec (Think holidays)
Tools:
- Facebook Anthology – A program that connects advertisers with digital media brands. In this case, major computer brands with a leading news publication, The Onion. It used the social network’s insights and scale to deliver targeted content.
- Vimeo
- Tumblr
Audience: Younger generation (18-35 years old)
Strategy:
1) Create a comical self-help show with a celebrity host around a real concern for young folks and associate it with owning old computers.
The Problem: Young people aren’t upgrading to new PCs. (The PCs feature high quality sound, boast up to 18 hours battery life and larger screens with small bezels.)
The Solution: Scare them into believing that by holding onto their old PCs, they’re turning into their parents. They can avoid becoming the technophobes their parents turned out to be by upgrading to new generation PCs.
The Result: The Dr. Jimm Show, a motivational self-help guru played by SNL’s Kenan Thompson.
Show Premise: Each guest on Dr. Jimm’s show is a young person who’s turning into their parents. But thankfully with some tough love and the help of a new PC, Dr. Jimm steps in before it’s too late.
Click here to view video. Password: ivotefortheonion
2) Leverage a classic concept of the younger generation that hits home: Fear of turning into your parents. Also hits on sub-conscious concept that resonates with the younger audience: It’s not cool to be like your parents.
3) Comedy is a big hit with younger audiences and does well on platforms like Facebook.
4) Insight-driven creative and contextual targeting has already proven successful, thus using Facebook’s insights and targeting tools set up this campaign for success.
5) The use of passwords on Vimeo to unlock video content creates the feeling of secrecy (remember those days when you would hide stuff from your parents), exclusivity and privileged.
6) Use of positive motivational messaging has a broad appeal to values.
7) Partnering with the well established The Onion (Labs), to create and produce the show was key for these global computer brands to reach a larger audience considering The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events with a daily readership of 4.3 trillion.
8) Having a celebrity host, especially Kenan Thompson, who is famous for being on Saturday Night Live and Nickelodeon, brings a built in following and familiarity.
9) Host Kenan Thompson was appearing in Fandango ads at the same time as the campaign, online, on TV and in theaters. Timing this campaign when this personality was receiving extra press from another campaign (which did not compete with this campaign) multiplied the audience reach.
What Success Looks Like:
o It appears that the majority of commenters weren’t aware that the show was an undercover commercial.
o Press from AdWeek and The Drum
Campaign: Intuit QuickBooks “It doesn’t take a genius to do your taxes” – OWN IT.
Goal: To reposition the TurboTax brand and to build meaningful, emotional connections with consumers.
Campaign Length: Months from New Years until end of tax season
Tools:
Audience: Small business owners
Strategy:
1) Interview small businesses for business advice and gather their stories on how they are making it. Types of questions include:
o What advice do you have for new businesses?
o How have you expanded your offerings?
o How does your location help to create a unique experience?
Add suggestive, yet subtle TurboTax sponsor slate or product placement in the video. Emphasis is on providing value via the business tip. Post 1-minute video interviews on Facebook.
| Small Business Owner explaining how he ‘Owns It’ Click here to view video |
2) Use #OWNIT to begin the conversation on small business advice to allow people to post their own “OWN IT” experiences.
3) Address the uncertainty and self-doubt many people have about doing their own taxes by showing how TurboTax delivers an effortless, highly personalized and playful experience so they can be confident their taxes are done right. Achieve this with amusing ads that feature real-life geniuses (a rocket scientist, mathematician and computer engineer) who show that TurboTax is so simple and intuitive that even they become redundant when trying to help people file their taxes with TurboTax.
4) Target Spanish speakers with Spanish language ads.
5) Integrate high-impact sports, entertainment and cultural moments throughout tax season, such as with the Super Bowl.
6) Supplement with
- Radio, digital and social
· 7 new 30-second television spot
· Super Bowl 30-second ad on Sunday, February 7
7) Partner with independent advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy and multicultural agency Grupo Gallegos to expand resources and build and execute campaign.
Whether creating awareness of a cause through your brand, producing a short comedy series built on real-life concerns, or sharing real interviews on audience members and the advice they have on a common struggle, these were all great strategies in terms of concept, timing and use of tools. Check back May 18th, when the Digiday Content Marketing Award winner for Best Use of Facebook will be announced.
