Americans consume more content than ever, but there are also more publications, platforms and technologies pushing out content than ever before. As American broadcast media becomes increasingly fragmented, it is more important than ever to engage an audience directly and in a more personal way, with branded content. The explosion of cable television and digital video, as well as the growth of interest-specific channels (both traditionally and digitally), allow for a more personalized approach, but this often comes at the cost of scale.

It isn’t enough to simply publish compelling content. That content needs to strongly resonate with its intended audience, and the distribution methods behind it need to meet them wherever they may be.

It is often necessary to draw users in through more traditional advertising methods like TV spots or digital display and video. More importantly, earned media driven through shareability has also become one of the most important components to taking branded content to the largest audience possible.

We launched with a 30-second TV spot with paid support on television and online. The online coverage linked to YouTube, which also housed the long form content. As the main spot created conversation, we used real-time social engagement to drive people to this additional content.

The Love video became a viral success, distributed purely through social with the support of only a tiny promoted social budget. We used social listening and sent a thank you and link to the film to everyone who had previously positively supported the campaign - first consumers, and then media.

Our launch spot has reached five million views in just one month. The lead online documentary has 200,000 views and 1,200 comments on YouTube alone. The Love film reached one million views in less than 24 hours and 3.5 million in under a week. It was shared 273,990 times across platforms. The video accrued 137 million social impressions, 115 million PR impressions and was covered by nearly every major news outlet in America. The campaign in its entirety reached 335 million impressions from PR and social. Social engagement increased 19 times over the previous years’ average.

The first two weeks of the campaign reversed the sales decline, increasing in-store dollar and volume sales by +3% and +10% respectively. Brand tracking shows purchase intent for those who have seen the content is nearly 10% higher than for those who haven’t.