Some of the best inspirational and engaging content comes from unexpected places. B2B and B2C brands surprise and delight their audiences with relevant, entertaining, or unique content opportunities, from Instagram to YouTube to new digital media partnerships.
Natalya Minkovsky finds some of the best examples for her Idea Garage column appearing in each Chief Content Officer magazine. Here are 15 of the most intriguing as she shared them in 2017.
Starbucks inspires with multichannel Upstander series (February 2017)
An ex-convict determined to keep other women from returning to prison has helped hundreds start new lives. A man who set out to help his autistic son find a job now runs a car wash where 85% of employees are on the autism spectrum. Residents of a historically impoverished town banded together to raise enough money to provide every student in the town with a college scholarship.
These inspiring stories and more are part of the Upstanders series from Starbucks. Upstanders is a collection of short stories, films, and podcasts that shares the experiences of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities. Written and produced by Starbucks chairman and CEO Howard Schultz and executive producer Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a former senior editor for The Washington Post, Upstanders aims to inspire Americans to engage in acts of compassion, citizenship, and civility.
Upstanders is Starbucks’ first original series of content using multiplatform distribution channels, including the Starbucks mobile app and online and in-store digital network. To inspire a social movement, Starbucks invites people to show their support by using Fotition – a social platform and app designed to help people complete photo challenges for charity.
Visitors to the Upstanders website can also fill out a form to nominate someone who’s making an extraordinary impact in the community.
Metropolitan Museum of Art creates extension for Chrome (February 2017)
Joining the plethora of cat videos and memes online is Meow Met, a Chrome extension that overrides the standard blank new tab page with a random cat from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online collection. Users can click on a work of art’s title to learn more about it. Launched through the museum’s MediaLab program as part of a strategy to connect with the next generation of museum visitors, the extension gained 3,500 users in the first week. It’s more proof that the internet just can’t get enough of cats.
JetBlue takes off with long-form content in HumanKinda video (February 2017)
JetBlue asks its audience: Are you humankind or HumanKinda? Defining “HumanKinda” as “when you are so busy, you feel as if you’re losing your humanity,” the airline created a short film that highlights the symptoms and effects of busyness in a humorous way, hoping to inspire people to take a step back and reflect on the busy state of their lives.
The 16-minute HumanKinda video is the airline’s first foray into long-form content. The film is accompanied by a quiz that generates a HumanKinda percentage based on the respondent’s answers; a Tumblr feed full of cartoons and statistics about busyness, time-saving hacks, and relaxation tips; and social media content that includes GIFs, memes, and videos. “Ultimately, it’s about the conversations we ignite,” says Phillip Ma, manager of brand advertising and content. “But if we can see a rise in getaways, it’ll obviously be exciting.”
Bacardi got behind a turntable with Instagram Stories (April 2017)
While many marketers were tentatively experimenting with Instagram’s Stories feature, Bacardi USA was among the first brands to show its creative mastery of the platform. Taking advantage of the format – quick, live content that comes with the capacity to fast forward or rewind from story to story – Bacardi USA turned its Instagram account into InstantDJ, a DJ simulator that allows users to take control of turntables, tapping left and right to control the music. The Instagram hack was perfectly on-brand for Bacardi USA, whose marketing already promotes “great music and great drinks” as key ingredients to a legendary party.
AT&T creates media brand with Hollywood actress (April 2017)
Looking for new ways to reach its female customers, AT&T is partnering with Oscar-winning actress and savvy businesswoman Reese Witherspoon to create a new media brand, Hello Sunshine. Hello Sunshine will “leverage the experience of its founders to create, curate, and discover powerful content by and for women across all platforms, from daily social and short-form digital content to television shows and motion pictures, including Witherspoon’s Academy Award-nominated film and television production company, Pacific Standard.” In addition to a video-on-demand channel and website, Hello Sunshine has Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat profiles for publishing social and short-form content. Little of the content, if any, contains AT&T branding.
Tropicana starts audience’s morning with a spark (April 2017)
Worried about high sugar content and extra calories, consumers are shying away from a traditional breakfast beverage: orange juice. This is bad news for Tropicana, and has sparked a new content marketing endeavor from the juice maker.
Published within A Plus, the positive journalism website founded by actor and technology investor Ashton Kutcher, Tropicana’s Morning Spark
