Winners: Aflac - What Does a Duck Say? Aflac! and Dixon Schwabl - Faces of Freedom
Aflac - What Does a Duck Say? Aflac!
What does a duck say? 15 years ago, the answer might have been “quack,” but today, everyone knows the right answer is “Aflac!”
The Aflac Duck is one of America’s most-beloved brand icons, and in 2015 the social media team took on the task of breaking down the barrier between the Aflac Duck’s commercial personality and his “everyday” life. When a person becomes a fan of the Duck on Facebook, they are inviting him into their home, so the team devised a creative strategy to not only maximize engagement with the Duck’s posts, but also turn his fans into brand advocates.
The Duck’s Facebook channel is meant to serve as a bright and entertaining moment in people’s busy day, with content that makes fans smile while driving a positive association with the Aflac brand.
Through thoughtful planning and active social listening, content inspired by various real-time trends was created throughout the year. By leveraging trending hashtags, the Duck became a part of many real-time conversations. For example, a post of the Duck dressed as a shark for Shark Week generated over 60,000 engagements.
And to ensure holistic brand support, mini-content series were developed around each of the brand’s new television commercials—including a sneak peek of the commercials before they aired, exclusively for the Duck’s Facebook fans.
Overall in 2015 the Aflac Duck’s Facebook community grew by 36% over 2014, and generated 3.8 million engagements.
Dixon Schwabl - Faces of Freedom
Working with Dixon Schwabl, Frontier Communications created a special campaign to honor America's veterans on Veterans Day 2015. Frontier asked anyone and everyone to submit a photo of a veteran who has made an impact on them. To participate, people would visit Frontier's Faces of Freedom landing page and submit their photos.
Once all of the photos were collected, Frontier published them in an interactive mosaic on the Faces of Freedom landing page (ftrfacesoffreedom.com). Social media advertising was the key advertising tool for this campaign and it was responsible for driving photo submissions and awareness.
Dixon Schwabl supported this campaign for Frontier, and promoted it heavily through Frontier’s social media platforms. Through strategic targeting and advertising, Dixon Schwabl was responsible for helping Frontier accomplish its submission goal of 450 stories shared.
Dixon Schwabl’s strategy was to use Facebook and Twitter advertising to promote the Faces of Freedom campaign, and drive traffic to the landing page. It ran conversion ads on Facebook and Twitter to drive and measure submissions from its social ads. In addition, funds were allocated for promoted posts, driving awareness of the initiative.
The ads ran across the entire Frontier footprint, targeting Frontier's current customer database and people who are interested in Frontier Communications, encouraging participation from everyone who knows a veteran.
The social media campaign saw terrific results. It gained nearly 1.5 million impressions, 4,914 website clicks and 494 story submissions. The goal was to drive 450 photo entries to the Faces of Freedom contest, and that was surpassed by nearly 50. The campaign received a total of 13,213 engagements, including 4,234 post likes, 319 comments and 678 shares. This resulted in an engagement rate of 1.71%, raising valuable awareness of the sacrifices veterans have made for their country.
Honorable Mentions:
- Milton Hershey School - Office of Communications
- National Audubon Society - Making Facebook Take Flight by Cultivating a Vibrant Online Community