The goal of the Oracle Virtual Road Trip was to showcase our customers, employees, and startups to increase awareness around our products, culture, and key initiatives. We aimed to provide entertaining and informational content that aligns to our focus areas around cloud applications and technologies, and how it could help our customers and prospects manage through the current uncertainty and lead their organizations into the future.
The Oracle Virtual Road Trip strategy was built around delivering authentic videos to our audience from New York to California. Each video would feature a customer, employee, startup, or influencer from their home state. We built out a website that followed the journey chronologically, as if traveling by car from the east coast to west coast.
Originally, this campaign was designed to be a physical road trip across the U.S., where we would travel across the nation to learn more about how Oracle and its technology is helping various organizations.
Due to the pandemic, we were not able to work with our spokespeople in-person to film videos. Instead, we utilized Zoom to conduct interviews or asked subjects to capture their own footage for our team to edit.
We also collaborated with influencers in the tech industry to join our Virtual Road Trip and help us reach a broader audience.
We wanted videos to be timely and coordinated with company initiatives. This included supporting our Hero Level sponsorship with the annual JDRF One Walk, promoting our AI@Work campaign for World Mental Health Day, celebrating Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund’s 50thAnniversary, and advocating for journalism transparency with VICE Media.
We chose locations based on Oracle events, product launches, and campaigns. Each video corresponded with a section on the website with additional information on their story and links to relevant blogs.
In addition, we developed the #OracleRoadTripContest to give away prizes from unique customers like the Chicago Bulls and C.O. Bigelow. This included developing our team’s first interactive Instagram and Facebook Story filter to increase engagement and promote Oracle Java’s 25thanniversary.
Our team gathered nominations for the Virtual Road Trip across the organization, and chose to cover 22 stories from our customers, startups, employees, and influencers over a course of 2 months.
We used Sauce, a video sharing platform, to easily access and download videos from our subjects.
We created an intro card for each state and a customized Instagram thumbnail that illustrated the location of the subject. The Instagram thumbnails were executed thoughtfully to incorporate a road that would connect all the images together when visiting our Instagram feed. Our feed showcased all of the featured organizations and people intertwined with one another.
Each social video linked back to the Virtual Road Trip website, where our audience could find more information on the story. Additionally, we optimized our content for search, ultimately ranking in the top of Google’s search results.
The #OracleRoadTripContest was developed in collaboration with our customers, Chicago Bulls and C.O. Bigelow. Winners were chosen to receive Bulls jerseys or a C.O. Bigelow giftset.
Additionally, to promote Java’s 25th anniversary, we created an interactive Instagram and Facebook Story filter with Java’s mascot, Duke. This encouraged our audience to engage with our content and share with their followers.
The Virtual Road Trip was a huge success. We visited 17 states and published 26 videos. The videos were viewed more than 1.7 million times. On social media, the content generated 8.9 million impressions and 31,000 engagements, with Instagram and Instagram TV videos accumulating the highest engagement rate. Additionally, more than 1,900 people opened and engaged with our Oracle Java Instagram and Facebook filter.
We drove more than 12,600 visits to our Oracle.com website for our audience to learn more about Virtual Road Trip stories, Oracle products, and key intiatives. We utilized SEO to bring the Virtual Road Trip website to the first page on Google search. LinkedIn drove the highest click-through-rate, exceeding our benchmark by more than 3X.
