Bustle’s audience of millions highly engaged millennial women have proven time and time again that they love getting nostalgic. The goal with this video was to give readers exactly what they’re looking for when they open their social media apps: a break from the noise, and something that feels fresh and entertaining.
Tapping into Hilary Duff’s iconic ‘00s legacy, we chose to have the actor take viewers on a walk down memory lane, giving our audience an opportunity to fondly recall Hilary’s most seminal career moments from the retrospective POV of the star herself. By asking Hilary to “remember her most iconic lines”, the concept had the potential to be funny as well as sentimental, and drive audience participation if Hilary struggled to remember certain scenes from her acting portfolio — our assumption, one that was proven correct, was that audience members may remember these scenes more clearly than Hilary herself and wouldn’t hold back on sharing the correctly finished lines in the comments section once published. Above all, we wanted this piece to be a fun way for Hilary to look back at her work, something that we hoped would shine through in the final footage from the shoot and create a heartwarming, reflective, and overridingly joyful piece of content for viewers and Hilary alike.
Several teams across BDG were involved in generating the concept for this piece of video content, starting with establishing which clips from her career Hilary would be trying to recreate. For such an iconic teen star, it was paramount that the scenes chosen were of emotional value to our audience. We canvassed the web and internal editorial team members for input on what were considered Hilary’s buzziest projects, which helped us to ensure there were moments that would connect with each and every one of her fans.
A particular focus was placed on this concept's roll-out across social media platforms, ensuring each segment could be individually distributed outside of its longer format. By asking Hilary to recreate scenes from multiple shows and movies that she starred in, we had a straightforward route to creating a series out of what began as a standalone longer form video on YouTube. This maximized our potential reach and ensured momentum was maintained as the cover story with Hilary was published online.
Across platforms, Bustle’s video content with Hilary Duff earned over 9.4M views and 1M engagements. On TikTok, the comments section was awash with fans of Hilary sharing their memories of the star: “this was the highlight of my pre-teen years”, “MY ICON”, and more. Even the official Disney Channel account joined in on the commenting, saying “There were just too many iconic lines to remember!” On YouTube, one of the most liked comments was “I wish this was longer!,” which highlights the overwhelmingly positive reaction we received to the entire video roll-out for this project.
While views and reach are a huge marker of success for BDG – both of which exceeded average performance on Bustle’s social platforms – it was the comments that really drove home the impact that these videos had on our audience, with one post on TikTok generating over 3.4K comments alone.
