Our brief was to celebrate Black History Month on the @apple instagram in a new way — going further than a one-off social post or performative brand activation. As the biggest brand in the world, we knew we had a responsibility to do more for the Black community.

The idea behind HOMETOWN was to create a month-long digital content series, elevating the perspectives of America’s leading Black image makers and showcasing how their Hometowns and local environments define the broader experience of being Black in America.

Our goal was not business growth but enacting real, cultural change within our realm of influence.

Photography has never been more powerful than it is today but it remains an uneven playing field for Black artists: there’s bias in what’s depicted, bias in who gets to depict it, and even bias in the technology that powers it. We wanted to play our part in evening out the playing field.

Pushing against the historical biases is a vanguard of Black creators who are rewriting Black history in real time. We looked to elevate these perspectives and break the perception of Blackness as a monolith by allowing them to showcase their hometowns through their lens, without limitation.

Our execution was grounded in the desire to do more than just a one-off social post or performative brand activation to mark Black History Month. We weren't looking to achieve business growth but enact real, cultural change and crafted every campaign element with this aim.

Originating from the @apple instagram channel, Hometown was a 32 day long content series that documented the voices and creative perspectives of America's leading Black image makers with a mix of still and moving imagery. The 32 day timeline was an important dimension to our message—with February being the shortest month of the year, we purposefully extended our content timeline to ensure the celebration of Black History was given the full month it deserves.

To ensure this powerful content was elevated beyond the Instagram feed, we then extended the campaign via broadcast, digital and OOH channels—unifying the digital and real world celebrations.

We partnered with Phillip Youmans — the first Black filmmaker to win the Founders Prize at the Tribeca Film Festiva—to direct a long-form, docu-style film on Apple’s YouTube channel. Youmans documented the work and perspectives of four Black creators that were featured in the @apple content series. Reiterating the themes from our @apple content, Youmans illuminated the experiences and perspectives of these creators, celebrating the Black experience, Black excellence, love, imagination and the connection between identity and place.

We also brought the work of these creators back into their communities through contextual OOH. The billboards created a nation-wide gallery of hometown perspectives, featuring the work of 33 creators across 17 major cities.

Hometown was designed for social impact and we saw evidence of achieving this via social listening and platform analytics. Our featured creators earned a 4.6% increase in followers on average, and had their work featured in press outlets and organic social conversations.

We also saw a brief period of net negative subscriber growth for @apple, as a small sub-set of our community decided they did not align with our values. Yet another reminder of why we needed to share them.