#HappilyEverEmpire on Valentines Day
This Valentines day we worked alongside the Empire State Building to create a competition where contestants had the chance to win a free Sandals Resorts Vacation. This project aimed to promote Sandals Resorts across channels and to improve brand awareness and engagement.
THE CHALLENGE
Our Valentines campaign, partnered with ESB, sought to build brand awareness, while generating an uplift in engagement and impressions. In turn, this promoted Sandals Resorts as a romantic destination getaway, perfect for couples, all the while positioning Sandals Weddings as an option for the newly engaged couples.
Through this campaign, we had big aspirations in delivering some brand and agency firsts, including our very first shoot on the Empire State building!
INSIGHT
We needed to stand out in the noise of Valentines day on social media, and to do this, we set ourselves the challenge of achieving some agency firsts and brand firsts. One way we achieved this was by premiering Sandal’s first ever YouTube video!
Our key demographic was young couples with disposable income, or ‘boujee insiders’; we decided that the best way to reach this audience was with the first ever Sandals x Empire State Building AR filter (another agency first), which catered to this groups social media habits.
THE SOLUTION
To deliver our intended aims, we created an approach combining a fully-fledged influencer programme, paid promotions, dark ads, as well as organic content.
There were 4 main phases to our approach on socials; on the lead up to Valentines day we began driving awareness of the ESB activation, phase 2 drove awareness and engagement around our AR filter and competition entries, phase 3 pushed traffic toward the YouTube wrap up and in phase 4 we wrapped up the promotion across socials.
THE IMPACT
Overall, the promotion was a hit! We superseded expectations on the majority of our content.
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We achieved 250% above our estimated impressions, reaching an astounding 5.9M impressions, we hit a 171% increase on our benchmark for video views, and we saw amazing growth on Sandals’ Instagram.
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Our campaign sentiment was overwhelmingly positive, and we received no negative mentions across all channels.
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Sandal’s YouTube Premier enjoyed great success in Phase 4 – with only a week of promotion, the video received 48k views, with 1 in 8 users coming from social media traffic ads.
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We received an excellent response from our very first AR filter, with over 4.1k people opening the filter, 761 captures and 14.8k overall impressions. Results show that we hit our key demographic of the 25-34 group, indicating the expected interest in AR from our younger audience.