Urban Decay built a social campaign on Pinterest where users could submit their best recreations of makeup styles that they've seen at their favorite music festivals. Throughout the campaign Urban Decay gave away free festival tickets to Pinterest users that created the best boards featuring festival looks.
The European beauty brand Essence made the most of their sponsorship of Justin Bieber's Believe Tour by creating social media events around each show.
They gave away free products at shows and offered various sweepstakes that highlighted user-generated content as contest entries for free tickets and other prizes.
Not only did they generate a lot of interest in their own brand, but they helped build buzz around each of the shows on the tour. The campaign resulted in 263 million brand impressions, 82,615 brand expressions, and 35 percent of on-site activation through social.
National Geographic launched a Facebook contest where their fans had a chance to have their own photo featured on the cover of the magazine and win two tickets for a free vacation. All the fans had to do was upload their photos and caption it and they were automatically entered to win.
This is a perfect example of leveraging a holiday to create a viral piece of social content. The beer maker Sam Adams posted this video across their social media platforms, showing off their new helium beer as an April Fools prank. You have to watch the video to see why it was such a hit.
Honey Bunches of Oatsran a campaign with the tagline “50 Million Smiles and Counting,” during which they shared the testimonial videos, images, and quotes from fans they had "made smile" across the country in exchange for a chance to win an all-expenses paid trip. By sharing the user-submitted content across Facebook and Instagram, they were able to add 162,000 new fans (a 721% increase) and increase engagement and traffic to their pages.
Popular restaurant chain, Qdoba, created a campaign where their fans could vote for their favorite queso, deciding which one the company would keep and which one would have to go.
The best part about this social media campaign was that the Qdoba team updated the results in real-time, keeping everyone engaged, and building suspense around the showdown.
With this campaign, TD Ameritrade was able to capitalize on the 2014 Winter Olympics hype by comparing the accumulation of small investments over time to the practice and preparation that athletes go through to compete.
An entire staff created for the campaign stayed in Sochi to document the athletes' journeys with photos, videos, and other content. The campaign resulted in 78,000+ uses of the campaign hashtag #itaddsup, a 12% increase in overall social audience, and 97 million brand impressions.
Biltwell sells motorcycling accessories and does a great job of keeping their fans engaged and passionate about their brand using their Facebook fan page. One way they do this is by sharing fan-shared helmet art on their timeline. Fans get their 15 minutes of fame and Biltwell gets to show off the awesome things people do with their products and "delight" their fans in the process.
GE launched a campaign hosting a #6SecondScienceFair on Vine and Tumblr where they re-vined posts from people using this tag to encourage interest in science, increase engagement, and build GE's reputation as an innovator. The particular Vine below highlights what happens when you combine milk, food coloring, and dish soap. It has been liked 130,000 times and re-vined 105,000 times.
The market for large family cars is very competitive, and the launch of the new Passat was somewhat a challenge, as the design was not indicating this was a completely new car.
Advanced driving assist systems, though, are main features in the new Passat including Trailer Assist. The optional Trailer Assist steers automatically while the driver is still responsible for gear shifting, acceleration and braking.
The target audience was adult men with a family and the need for a roomy car, which often also means from time to time a need of a trailer. Passat is segment leader among family cars, and most of them are equipped with a trailer hitch.
The agency also build on one basic insight: Most people find it difficult to reverse with a trailer and hate to do it. A system that will help them out will obviously create attention. However, MediaComneeded to demonstrate it in an exceptional way, to ensure that the target group would find it worthwhile seeing and sharing.
Since social media to a large degree is about entertainment, and surprising videos always create a large number of viewers and involvement itdecided to move along that path.
This gave MediaComthe communication strategy and the idea for the campaign.
Strategy
The fight for attention is hard even for entertaining video content. MediaCombelieved ithad content with a potential for sharing, but in order to make it happen ithad it to get it right from the start, and decided to make the content look less like a commercial thus increasing the potential for sharing.
Most importantly it decided to focus its paid digital media towards young adult men even though the average car buyer is 40 years +. By targeting influencers rather than the actual car buyer, itexpected to achieve far higher sharing and thus organic views of the video, and the car buyers would get the video from their younger colleagues and children rather than from Volkswagen directly.
Even though it was tempting to use TV from the start, the agencydecided to place TV at the end of the campaign period, to create as many organic views as possible before launching the TV ad.
At the start it sponsored Facebook posts and placed the video on selected sites in the BeOn network. Itmade the content easy to share and used YouTube as the hub for organic viewing and sharing.
The content lived up to its potential and was shared even faster than assumed. This gave a good story to use in PR, and the 250 online articles in 46 countries further increased the engagement.
Execution
The creative solution was to perform a stunt where the agency wanted to demonstrate an exceptional maneuvering with a trailer in reverse at high speed.
In ordinary streets and along ordinary roads where the public should believe they observed a 100% real reverse driving with a trailer.
In order for the illusion to be realistic, itbuilt a trailer around a car, which itstripped for the body. This way itallowed the “trailer” to reverse with a new Passat, giving the illusion that the Passat was reversing.
Stuntmen drove the trailer and the car and everything was recorded on video, which gave two films: One that shows the actual stunt and one behind-the-scenes film. Both produced primarily for the use in social media.
Results
The campaign reached the following global results initiated from a countrywith only fivemillion people:
• Created a Facebook reach of more than 55 million, • Achieved more than 28 million video views so far, 69% of these were organic.•The videos were watched in 125 different countries•Close to 1,800,000 engagements with the campaign:- 1.190.000 likes- 470.000 shares- 133.000 comments.
• Reached 2.4 million views on YouTube, all of these were organic•The stunt was described in more than 250 online articles in more than 46 countries with more than 396 million potential readers•The campaign was launched in a post diesel gate atmosphere with a lot of negative buzz around the brand, and managed to break the negative curve•The sale of Volkswagen Passat in Norway increased 15% the following month.
This week saw the roll-out of Unilever's latest film in its wider 'Bright Future' sustainability campaign, which highlights the 'social good' that its brands – including Dove, Persil and Domestos - are doing to help build a better future.
The TV, online and in-store campaign, by Ogilvy, is running in the UK, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia, putting the spotlight on sustainability initiatives carried out by its individual brands, rather than just the corporate entity.
“People increasingly care about how the decisions they make affect the world we live in," said Keith Wedd, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Unilever. "Our Bright Future campaign shows people that when they buy our products they’re not just purchasing a bar of soap, they’re enabling children to live past the age of five by helping to teach handwashing; and they’re helping children access education."
“Brands with a purpose are at the heart of Unilever and we believe that the small choices we all make every day can make a big difference to the world we live in,” he added.
The campaign centres on a video called 'So Long Old World', featuring a young girl talking about changes happening in the world, alongside which text pops up to show exactly how Unilever's brands have contributed to that.
