The Audible 20th Anniversary was a surround sound marketing campaign that focused on celebrating our listeners. It was a two-part initiative, starting with a member testimonial "20 Years of Listeners" car contest in September and closing with 20 days of celebration in November.
We wanted to honor our listeners and showcase all the amazing user-generated content we received throughout the 20 days, plus our history, legendary Audible narrators, and Audible member spotlights from our car contest, through a celebration video that marked the final day of the campaign.
Our strategy was centered on one idea: be customer obsessed by honoring the passion of our listeners.
We used email communications and our social media postings to drive traffic to a dynamic landing page (audible.com/audible20) that updated every morning with new perks, like free audiobooks, opportunities to win Audible credits, customer spotlights, and curated editorial content. In September, we ran our "20 Years of Listeners" car contest that encouraged customers to share personal stories of how Audible impacted their lives for a chance to win one of 20 brand-new Volvo SUVs. We chose the car as the prize for our contest because our largest use-case for listening is drive time (commuting, road trips).
Specific promotions that contributed to the UGC used in the celebration video:
- Customer comments from three social sweepstakes that encouraged our community to share their first Audible listen, their essential audiobook, and their proudest listening achievement for a chance to win a free Audible credits. This was hugely successful because our customers were rewarded with what they value the most, more audiobooks on us.
- Favorite audiobooks and narrators from our "Audible Library Showdown" that encouraged our community to share their Audible libraries on social media. This promotion also acted as a recommendation tool for other followers to discover new audiobooks and narrators that their fellow listeners love. Our customers actively seek out recommendations for their next listen and also love to share their favorite audiobooks, so this was a crowd pleaser.
- Video submissions from our "This is Audible" video campaign that encouraged our community to record a video of them reciting the three legendary words that start every Audible audiobook, "This is Audible". This moment is narrated by Rick Lewis, one of Audible's earliest employees, who is largely regarded by our community as a rock star; and the words represent a "magical moment" because it represents the beginning of a listener's escape into their next audiobook.
-Video submissions from our "20 Years of Listeners" car contest highlighted our diverse community and reasons our listeners turn to Audible. Not only do they listen for entertainment, but they also use it to inspire their creative process, motivate their business or personal development goals, or seek solace as a stress reliever during moments of medical recovery.
This campaign was unique in that it was designed to celebrate and highlight our listeners, rather than promote sales, new audiobooks, or our service.
Through all of these customer-obsessed promotions, we received thousands of UGC in the form of text and video that we hand-selected for the celebration video. Our celebration video was viewed over 50k times (organically) across our social pages and delighted all the customers that were featured in the video. In terms of social engagement, our campaign saw a 5x increase in engagement compared to channel average. In the month of November, we saw improvements in new member NPS during this time period along with impressive take rates of each of our promotions.
