Parents and their children are pulled in a million different directions by thousands of hours of content today from various screens. To create a successful branding campaign for social media, we needed to determine who would be our likeliest viewers, but also what would be the best possible approach for finding and drawing them. We determined parents were our best target—they control what their kids see and want to feel good about it. So, we turned this challenge into a benefit: We made our campaign about this chaotic sea of channels.

Our idea? #LiveLifeAnimated. DreamWorks isn’t just the largest provider of classic family content, it’s content that stands out—content you can trust. It matters what you and your children watch, so the best option is to #LiveLifeAnimated with DreamWorks Animation. We’d tell this story not just with DreamWorks’ intellectual property, but also with the people behind it all.

In the #LiveLifeAnimated campaign, characters, kids, parents and animators share why what we watch matters, and why they love DreamWorks, in original content across Facebook and Instagram. We launched in October and November 2017 during a four-week “fallow” period—between property launches and pre-holiday. We utilized one week for an introduction to the campaign, and then one week for each of three themes that matter to our audience: characters parents can believe in, positive messages shared through plot lines, and programming for the whole family.

We added in user-generated content and testimonials, along with themed contests in between regular content for DreamWorks’ dedicated channels. Also, we utilized not just DreamWorks characters, but content about their creators to tell the story behind the story: DreamWorks’ content is so good because the people behind it are good—and that matters. We created a dozen original videos and interviews with legendary and current animators.

Our #LiveLifeAnimated campaign didn’t just resonate with viewers. The audience’s response to the creative—and the way we unfolded it through social media—showed us that this was a story for the ages.

Engagement on campaign posts shot up 600% over the channels’ average, with more than 22 million impressions and 500,000 engagements across 30 original pieces of content, including a dozen original videos and interviews with animators. We also built a foundation for future campaigns that DreamWorks Animation can build upon, demonstrating that parents are ready to support it as a family entertainment brand and not just its individual animated properties.