Tiffany | Tiffany Blue by

Sugar Pop Wishes shows you can position your brand around nearly anything to increase brand awareness -- in their case it's around their signature blue. Instagram users posts tens of thousands of photos with the hashtag #tiffanyblue and many of the blue items have nothing to do with Tiffany. 

40th birthday cake balls 🎂4⃣0⃣ #sugarpopwishes #cakeballs #40thbirthday #turning40 #tiffanyblue #tiffanybluecake #bentonville #homemade

A photo posted by Sugar Pop Wishes (@sugarpopwishes) on Aug 21, 2015 at 12:36pm PDT

Urban Decay | Get Electric. Festival Style.

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. 

Essence | Justin Bieber Believe Tour Sponsorship

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 | My Nat Geo Covershot

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.

Samuel Adams| April Fools: Helium Beer

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 Oats | 50 Million Smiles and Counting

Honey Bunches of Oats ran 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.

Qdoba | Queso Bliss Showdown

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. 

TD Ameritrade | #itaddsup

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 | Fan Helmet Art

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 | #6SecondScienceFair

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.

Volkswagen | Trailer Assist

BRAND:

VW

CATEGORY:

Automotive

REGION:

Norway

DATE:

January - March 2016

AGENCY:

MediaCom

MEDIA CHANNEL:

Branded Content,Online

Insight 

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, MediaCom needed 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 it decided to move along that path. 

This gave MediaCom the communication strategy and the idea for the campaign. 

Strategy 

The fight for attention is hard even for entertaining video content. MediaCom believed it had content with a potential for sharing, but in order to make it happen it had 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, it expected 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 agency decided 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. It made 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, it built a trailer around a car, which it stripped for the body. This way it allowed 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 country with only five million 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.