Books compete with myriad forms of distraction. According to a study by the Max Planck Institute, our urge for newness is causing people to switch focus more regularly, opting for quick hits in lieu of the depth of a story.

In 2020, these habits were further perpetuated. According to an eMarketer study, Streaming and OTT viewing saw a step-change (up 33.9% from 19.9% in 2019). The “single tasking” of book-reading takes concentration, but its benefits are proven. It can lower stress, give people a depth of understanding about subjects, and even make you live longer (British Journal of Medical Practice).

Recognizing that books were experiencing attention competition from all quarters, Amazon Books’ intention was to inspire reading again in a sea of scrolling – the goal was restarting a healthy habit and helping people rediscover the benefits amidst attention fragmentation and never-ending choice.

Amazon Books focuses on inspiring readers by making it easy to read and get more out of reading. For this campaign, we needed to focus beyond avid readers – since they were already enjoying the goodness and didn’t need a nudge. So, we set our sights on those likely to benefit – people who found themselves in the throws of mindless scrolling. To better understand them, we built an audience based on media consumption behaviors. We discovered a group of young and mid-career professionals (41.8MM large) who were stretched-thin and under-stress; they work full-time in jobs building their careers and families. They have little time to relax and find it hard to unwind. What free time they have is precious to them…

But, they aren’t always sure they’re making the most of it. In their own words, they spend much of their free time aimlessly scrolling through their feeds (YouGov

Using the visual language of social content, we hid lines from books in plain sight within their social feeds across Twitter, Tinder, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit and Snap. Hiding lines of books wasn’t enough though.

On Twitter, Amazon Books secured early beta access to a new ad experience: transforming the Like button into an animated book emoji. When Tweets and re-tweets carried the campaign hashtag #YouJustStartedaBook, which many generously shared in the comments, the like button animated, flipping book pages as if read cover-to-cover.

Similarly on Tinder, we matched people with books through branded cards that featured lines from books. Swipes turned to a joyful surprise, revealing that #YouJustStartedaBook.

Once a reader clicked, swiped, or tapped, they were taken to an onsite landing page featuring designed book quote “tiles” to be discovered which kept to the visual style of the campaign.

The campaign improved perceptions by +12.6ppts that book reading is time well spent, and drove a 5.7ppt unaided lift that “I will read a book in the next 7 days” (2.5ppt benchmark, Kantar). The campaign brought millions of qualified site visitors to discover new books. Though reading, not book sales, was the objective, the campaign pleasantly delivered positive sales lift.

On Twitter, there were 8.6M likes, 144K retweets and quote tweets, and 30K replies. The hashtag trended organically in the top 10 with 124K unique tweets.

Tinder drove the most referrals to Amazon Books across the entire campaign and was one of the top performing ad executions on Tinder in Q4 with an average engagement rate of 6% (2-3x above benchmarks).

Beyond driving commercial success and exceeding intended outcomes, we created something that resonated – 97% felt positive about the campaign on Twitter and 84% expressed ‘Joy’.