Students and Practitioners

Bosse’s Milk

The German discount supermarket Lidl had been widely successful across Europe, however it encountered a unique obstacle in its Swedish stores. Swedes are fiercely loyal to milk that is produced in their own country, from Swedish dairy cows. Even though Lidl was aware of this preference and only sold Swedish milk, many Swedes erroneously believed the milk came from Germany, where the organization’s headquarters were located. In response to declining milk sales, the company began reading comments posted on Facebook, where it found a consumer named Bosse who claimed the milk had dubious origins and that he wouldn’t be interested in purchasing it. Lidl, in cooperation with PR agency Grey, targeted this single customer with a comprehensive social media and in-store campaign. It renamed its milk product Bosse’s Milk, reprinted all of the milk bottles to feature this new name, and even included Bosse’s likeness on the labels. Additionally, billboards and advertisements were placed throughout the country and an online video was produced. At the end of the campaign, Bosse posted on Facebook that he had been convinced of the milk’s Swedish origins. Milk sales increased by more than 8 % and all the bottles of Bosse’s milk, totaling 2,650 liters, were sold out in Lidl stores across Sweden.

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty

Inspired by the results of its 2004 survey which revealed that only 2% of women worldwide consider themselves to be beautiful, Dove sought to change attitudes about women’s beauty on a global scale. The company’s initial campaign, called Dove for Real Beauty,commenced in 2007 with a series of ads, billboards, and commercials in the United States featuring images of women who did not adhere to traditional, and oft times unachievable, beauty standards. In 2013, the company produced a series of videos entitled Real Beauty Sketches, which highlighted the negative perceptions that women often have of their bodies. It received 163 million views around the globe and presented a powerful affront to what were once believed to be wholly unchangeable ideas about what makes a woman attractive. Dove also created an app for Facebook called the Ad Makeover, which allowed women to block negative body image ads. These advertisements were then replaced by content from Dove featuring inspirational messages created from keywords chosen by Facebook users. More than 50% of women who used the app helped create positive messages and 71% of users indicated that they felt more attractive after viewing Dove’s content.

Send Your Facebook Profile to Cape Town

In an effort to promote tourism to Cape Town, South Africa and expose potential tourists to the city’s lesser-known sites, Cape Town Tourism and the South African branch of Ogilvy implemented a public relations campaign to send Facebook users to Cape Town’s attractions virtually. They created three online videos encouraging users to send their social media profiles on vacation. These videos featured Facebook’s grey-shadowed profile image superimposed on a human body in various tourist destinations throughout the Cape Town region. Users who sent in their profiles and were selected to participate in the campaign were able to create an itinerary and go on a virtual trip that came complete with boarding passes, personalized videos, social media updates, and a chance to win an “in-person” trip to Cape Town. In addition to personalized content and videos, participants also received souvenirs via traditional postal mail from the destinations on their profiles’ itineraries. At the end of the profile vacation, users received personalized videos featuring highlights from their trips. According to Ogilvy, more than 350,000 users engaged with the campaign and bookings of Cape Town vacations for the following year increased by 118 percent.

Bushmills Live

The Irish Whiskey producer Bushmills created an event with true global reach to boost brand recognition and generate sales by people between the ages of 18-34 – an increasingly influential group of consumers. In 2013, it hosted Bushmills Live,a two-day whisky and music festival held in an Irish whiskey distillery. Nearly 50,000 people entered to win tickets to the event through a Facebook app. The event featured 40 artists who performed live in front of an audience of 100 media representatives from around the world and 400 people who won tickets to the event. Bushmills hosted live events in cities including Prague and Moscow and launched a series of social media and giveaway events to members of the international media to generate buzz leading up to the main concert. The effort was a worldwide success, with the spirits company seeing coverage in over 300,000 articles in 30 countries and an increase in sales of nearly 13% worldwide.

The Autocomplete Truth

While many individuals worldwide believed that gender inequality was no longer a modern reality, the United Nations aimed to change that misconception with a campaign highlighting the pervasiveness of this very contemporary, global problem. The campaign featured photographs in which women’s portraits were overlaid with autocomplete boxes strategically placed over their mouths, showing top automatically completed responses when the phrase “Women should” was entered into Google. The autocompletes revealed offensive statements and entries conforming to retrograde gender stereotypes. The photographs appeared online and were shareable using the campaign’s unique hashtag #womenshould, created to facilitate online discussions about gender inequality. In addition, a film that showed female feats throughout history and juxtaposed the autocomplete sentences was released online and translated into multiple languages. The campaign garnered 1.2 billion global impressions, with Twitter impressions exceeding 224 million. In addition, it achieved widespread media coverage and drove conversations about women’s roles around the globe.

The Gnome Experiment

When Kern, a manufacturer of precision scales, sought to drive sales and raise awareness of the company’s reputation for accuracy, Ogilvy Public Relations/London created a character – an adorable gnome who they named Kern – and flew him around the world along with the company’s scales, asking customers and scientists to measure his weight in locations around the globe. The company shared photos of the gnome’s global adventures and facts about gravity through both social media and the traditional press around the world. The campaign reached over 350 million people in 152 countries, triggering a 22 percent sales increase in just two weeks. It also won the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ 2013 Excellence Award for a global public relations campaign. As the Institute noted, “taking a dry scientific subject in a technical B2B sector and applying a creative idea to generate a strong and long lasting storyline with global relevance, represents best practice in every sense.” 

Airbnb’s  #OneLessStranger Campaign

As a company that relies almost exclusively on its users’ willingness to interact with and trust relative strangers to provide them with accommodation during their travels, Airbnb had a vested interest in encouraging people to become more at ease with the prospect of meeting new people and opening their homes to them. On New Year’s Eve 2014, Airbnb launched its One Less Stranger campaign and challenged its users to perform random acts of kindness. A total of 100,000 users were given US $10 with the caveat that the money must be used to do a good deed for a stranger. The chosen users were encouraged to share their stories with the unique hashtag #OneLessStranger and a dedicated webpage was created to spotlight particularly noteworthy interactions.  Users who were not selected in the contest were also encouraged to join in and share their charitable doings. In its 2015 entry to the Shorty Awards , the company reported that, within three weeks of its launch, more than 3 million individuals around the world were participating in or engaging with the campaign. According to Airbnb, One Less Stranger resulted in approximately 91,000 new guests and more than 20,000 hosts joined the site immediately after the campaign.

LinkedIn’s Bring in Your Parents Day

In 2013, the business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn started Bring in Your Parents Day after a survey revealed that more than a third of parents were not completely familiar with what their sons and daughters’ careers entailed and more than half of them wanted to have more in-depth information about what their sons and daughters did at work. Initially, only LinkedIn employees at all of its global locations were encouraged to participate in the event, however the program was soon expanded to workers at any participating organization. Parents who visited their “children’s” place of work attended special information sessions and participated in activities designed to provide a more detailed overview of their sons and daughters’ job functions and duties. The campaign has grown significantly since its first inception and its third installment in November 2015 took place in 18 countries.

Earth Hour 2015

In 2007, the World Wildlife Fund wanted to raise awareness about the environmental consequences of climate change in Australia. In partnership with the Australian PR firm Leo Burnett, the company urged Sydney’s denizens to turn off their lights for one hour on March 31, 2007 at 7:30 pm. The WWF’s campaign utilized media, the state government, text message alerts, outdoor displays, and a series of PSAs airing on local radio to spread the word. More than 2.2 million people participated in the event, resulting in a 10% reduction in energy consumption. The campaign went global in 2008 and Earth Hour 2015was practiced in 172 countries. More than 10,000 landmarks around the world also turned off their signature lights. The WWF reached more than 378 million users on Twitter in the week before the campaign.

Share a Coke  

In 2011, Coca Cola, in conjunction with the public relations firm Ogilvy & Mather Sydney, launched a campaign in Australia dubbed Share a Coke. The 150 most popular names of people in Australia were imprinted on Coca Cola bottles and consumers were encouraged to share the iconic drink with those sharing the label’s name. That summer, 230 million bottles of Coca Cola were purchased in Australia (a country which has a population of 23 million)! Coca Cola went on to implement the campaign in 70 countries worldwide, with local adaptations in different
marketplaces. In lieu of using first names, Coca Cola elected to use nicknames on the bottles sold in China. In Japan, the campaign was implemented as Share a Coke and a Song. Japanese Coke bottles bore labels featuring years starting with 1957, the year Coca Cola first launched in Japan. Consumers were able to listen and share the top 10 songs of the labels’ year using a special nine-digit code. Share a Coke was credited with boosting Coke’s sales in the United States of America by over 2% and raising young Australians’ Coke consumption by 7%.

Meet Me at Starbucks

In its first global campaign, Starbucks chose not to create a campaign that focused exclusively on coffee, but to instead highlighted its stores across the globe. In partnership with 72andSunny, it produced a short, documentary-style film entitled Meet Me at Starbucks in 2014. It was filmed entirely in one day with footage from 59 stores in 28 countries and showcases the diverse ways customers make use of Starbucks locations throughout the globe. The campaign won a 2014 Shorty Award for Best in Hospitality and had more than 91 million impressions on social media.

Thank You Mom!  

At the 2012 London Olympics, global consumer products company Procter and Gamble turned its Thank You Mom! campaign into one of its largest global initiatives. In the days leading up to the Olympics, it featured advertisements in print, online, broadcast, and social media that highlighted the important role of mothers around the world. The campaign was launched simultaneously with a YouTube video entitled the “Best Job.”Shot in London, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, and Los Angeles, the video featured images of young athletes being tended to and taken to practices and sports activities by their mothers. It concluded with images of athletes from around the world competing in the Olympics with their mothers cheering them on from the stands and embracing them at finales. The campaign garnered 33.6 billion earned media impressions and 17 million YouTube views around the world.

HSBC’s Ability Stories

In an award-winning campaign, the multinational bank HSBC designed a global, internal public relations campaign that coincided with the United Nations’ International Day of Persons with Disabilities. The aim of the campaign, entitled Ability Stories, was to raise awareness about employees with disabilities, reinforce HSBC’s ongoing commitment to providing support for their global workforce, and attract a diverse pool of talent worldwide. The bank rebranded its employee disability support group, which included 1,500 members, under the new name HSBC Ability Network. As part of this transition, the financial corporation encouraged employees to share their stories, with the caveat that they focused on what they were able to do rather than their individual disabilities. Inclusion events were also hosted in the U.K., Canada, Brazil, and Mexico and included events that raised awareness for mental health. Employees from Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, U.K., United States, Malaysia, Japan, Qatar, and Singapore shared their stories on a variety of health issues, including ADHD, Asperger’s, OCD, and hearing impairments. The employees shared their stories locally; then four short documentaries were placed on the internal HSBC website before they appeared on YouTube, where they were subtitled in several languages. Since the start of the campaign, membership in the Ability Network has increased by 30% and HSBC employees viewed the videos more than 11,000 times.

Match Made in Hel

To promote Finland as an airport that offers rapid connections between the East and West, Finnair partnered with the Helsinki airport to launch an online competition to win a private skating session with the Finnish professional skateboarder Arto Saari. Seven winners from around the world were selected. In an unprecedented move by the Helsinki airport, the finalists were permitted to skateboard on the airport’s grounds, including its terminals, aircraft hangers, and even the tarmac. The entire event was filmed and the unique hashtag #matchmadeinhel was used to document the event, from the skateboarders’ recruitment all the way to the production of the online video series. The content was viewed in 118 countries around the globe, received approximately 110 million impressions, and reached 46 million people.

Inspired by Iceland

In 2010, Iceland experienced the eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull. Coupled with the effects of the global economic crisis, the disaster threatened to cripple Iceland’s tourism industry. In order to boost tourism numbers, the Icelandic government and individual corporations in the country’s tourism sector banded together to produce an innovative, holistic tourism campaign named Inspired by Iceland. The campaign’s first mission was to produce positive images of Iceland to combat the swarm of negative publicity centered on the nation’s natural disaster. The tourism industry, in cooperation with the London-based public relations firm the Brooklyn Brothers, encouraged people who had visited Iceland to post comments, images, and videos on Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo about their positive experiences. In addition, they created a dedicated Inspired by Iceland website that housed live streams of popular tourist destinations, a live web concert, and videos of famous denizens of Iceland. During the winter season, when tourist numbers were low, the campaign added an additional component entitled Honorary Icelander.As part of this seasonal initiative, Icelanders, including the president, were encouraged to invite foreign visitors to their homes and many of these interactions were filmed and posted on YouTube. The campaign was a success and generated approximately £138.7 in tourism-related revenue, with 22.5 million stories shared via the internet.

Cultured Beef Burger

In 2013, when scientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands created the world’s first “cultured beef burger,” they sought to inform the non-scientific community of their success. The researchers partnered with Ogilvy to begin a worldwide public relations campaign that would convey both the uniqueness of their achievement as well as its significance to the future of food production. The company filmed a segment featuring the burger, an on-air tasting, and an explanation of the process given in layman’s terms by one of the research scientists, inviting reporters from around the globe to the taping. The segment was re-used by media outlets around the world more than 5,000 times. The story received widespread print, media, and online coverage, reaching approximately 500 million people.

Thanks to Samantha McManus and Rachael Durant for their research assistance.