Behind-The-Screens Campaign
The "Behind-the-screens with a Webby Winner" is an innovative campaign launched by the Webby Awards, a prestigious international honor celebrating internet excellence since 1997. Presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, these awards recognize exceptional achievements across various internet-related fields, ranging from websites to online films and videos.
The campaign targeted past video winners with significant viral content and massive followings, some with as many as 8 million followers. It offered a glimpse into a day in the life of these influential creators. The main goal was to encourage more entries, particularly in social and video categories, before the extended entry deadline on Feb 9th.
campaign Insights
We encouraged Webby winners to share their creative process with their audience, giving them a peek into how they make award-winning content. We added a Q&A session for fans to interact with their favorite creators. We also showcased the behind-the-scenes action for fans.
Concurrently, we launched a "Webby Team Picks" initiative featuring non-Webby winners. By tagging these creators at the same time we were showing them successful figures in their field, we aimed to inspire them to enter the Webbys ahead of our Extended Entry Deadline.
THE Strategy
Our project ran from Jan 20th to Feb 8th. I targeted 20 Webby video and social winners with the largest followings and highest engagement, hoping at least 5 would agree to take over our social media. Dr Mike (4.4M Instagram followers), The Try Guys (1.6M), Javadoodles (343K), BETCHES(9.2M), Recess Therapy (3M), and Watcher (500K) all agreed to participate.
I arranged promotional assets for their Instagram profiles and tagged them to encourage them to share the event with their communities. I also set up a Q&A page on our site so fans could interact directly with their favorite creators.
After each takeover, I edited together a Reel, highlighting the best parts of each session. I then encouraged the creators to share this content again on their social platforms, while also posting it on our other channels like TikTok, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
THE EXECUTION
I asked my team to choose their favorite creators and featured their content every day. This ran alongside our Behind-the-screens with a Webby Winner campaign, which I held every other day, ensuring a diverse range of content for our audience and so that potential entrants would see them and be encouraged to enter.
Simultaneously, I initiated the Webby Team Picks program...
Prior to our campaign, we faced a challenge: Our engagement was low, and story views were minimal. We needed to find an innovative way to involve our community, which had been primarily reached through sporadic viral videos that didn't target creators effectively.
Our solution was a stellar campaign that not only engaged our existing community but also drew in the fans of various creators. The response exceeded our expectations, with an influx of emails inquiring about the next takeover and heightened activity from both our community and the creators' communities. New creators and talent managers even reached out to us, expressing interest in being part of the Webbys for the first time.
We focused on several key KPIs: Reach and Impressions, email taps, and entries driven by traffic from social media.
Results
- Our reach surged to 3.2M, an increase of 951k.
- Impressions rose significantly to 4.5M, up by 1.7M.
- Email taps saw a 50% boost.
- Traffic from organic social media peaked at 2363 in one day, a massive jump from the average of 400 per day.
- Direct entries from organic social increased by 30, and indirect entries from organic social grew by 10. This represents hundreds of thousands of dollars in entries driven by organic social media.
Our campaign was a resounding success, achieving results that far exceeded our initial goals and expectations. The community's involvement was phenomenal.
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