In the lead-up to 2017's back-to-school season, Amazon needed to generate awareness and excitement around Amazon Prime Student, and encourage students to consider Amazon for their back-to-school needs. To do this, they teamed up with CollegeHumor for a creative approach that targeted its influential audience of millennials and college attendees with custom editorials, videos, content hubs, and more.
Every year, students are bombarded with back-to-school messaging asking them to buy, but never really relating to the harsh realities of student life. To stand out, CollegeHumor wanted to make sure that Amazon reached out to students from a place of empathy and offering solutions (with a splash of humor, of course!).
We did this by creating a range of custom and native content like our "Honest College Tour" that portrayed what it's really like to go through a tour of a college campus, while others like our fan-favorite Ask CH series featured relatable Q&As with CH talent.
We also created native editorial pieces such as our "Honest Back to School Shopping List," a comic that not only listed the products necessary for the new school year, but laid out the real-world reasons as to why (e.g., an extra phone charger, "because an uncharged phone in college is basically torture;" or sandals, because "college showers are gross and unavoidable.").
Together, this content appealed to students by being both relatable and useful – but most importantly it was content that was equal parts CollegeHumor and Amazon Prime Student.
Simply put, CollegeHumor killed it.
Our videos generated over 4 million views and "Honest College Tour" even became the #5 trending video on YouTube the day of its release.
Native editorials saw upwards of 2 million impressions each, with the "Honest Back To College Shopping List" generating over 2.5 million total impressions.
The "Back To School" hub that served as a focal point on CollegeHumor.com for all of the content we created drew an audience of nearly 600K, as the content aligned with the CollegeHumor student-driven brand at a time when that audience was preparing for a new semester.
And the proof that it all came together to create a positive impact for the brand was that our content was able to move Purchase Intent of Amazon Student Prime up 23% and Aided Awareness up 17.8% as measured by Millward Brown.
Overall, this campaign was an incredible success in accomplishing its key goals of building positive perception and consideration of Amazon Prime Student in the crucial back to school season.
