Friends are one of the most important parts of our lives, yet they are often something we take for granted. So we created the FRIENDS campaign to celebrate what our friends give us and what we give back to them. The campaign launched in the United Kingdom and ran across a wide range of touch points including TV, cinema, digital OOH, traditional OOH, magazines, newspapers, and on-platform video. We also created a new photo sharing product to help everyone share what makes their friendships unique. We then celebrated these friendships by dynamically displaying people’s photos on digital screens, showing a real-time pulse of friendship across the UK.

The FRIENDS campaign is fully integrated effort that ran in the UK. The campaign launched with two 60-second films: one about adventurous friends and a second about how sport brings us together. The sport film ran in conjunction with the Rugby World Cup, one of biggest sporting events in the UK. We also ran OOH featuring different moments that celebrated universal truths of friendship. The campaign continued with magazine and newspaper ads that ran the day after the Rugby World Cup Final celebrating friendship in sport.

On platform, we ran nine films about different friendships to introduce a new photo sharing product: The Friends Photo Tool. It empowered people to participate in the campaign by customizing photos of friends with text or emoji and sharing what makes their friendships unique. The best images were dynamically displayed on over 1,000 digital billboards, showing a real-time pulse of friendship across the UK.

The FRIENDS campaign ran in the United Kingdom and quickly spread virally around the world. People from 124 countries used the tool to share their friendships and participate in the campaign, while the films have garnered over 43 million videos views. To date, the campaign has generated more than 320 million impressions. Most importantly, the FRIENDS campaign reminded people about the importance of friendship, gave them a way to celebrate their friendships with the world and helped change their perceptions about Facebook.

The goal of the FRIENDS campaign was to show people the value of Facebook by reminding them just how important their friendships are. To do this, we explored human truths about what friendship means to everyone and how it enriches all of our lives. With a broad target audience of people in the United Kingdom, aged 18-54, we knew that we needed to create iconic work that reminded people why their friendships are so important, while giving everyone a way to participate in the campaign and share what makes their own friendships special.

Friendship is the cornerstone of Facebook. So we set out to create an integrated, multi-platform brand campaign to show people the value of Facebook by reminding them how important their friends are in their lives. To do this, we needed to talk about friendship in a way that would resonate with everyone and show how the more we participate in our friendships, the more meaningful and richer they become.