THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 15th Annual Shorty Awards

SpongeBob Popsicle Painting

Winner in Images

Objectives

For over 20 years, Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants series has been the pinnacle of positivity and F.U.N. Our perennial task? Keep Bikini Bottom’s trademark silliness & creativity fresh, a goal we hit out of the park with this standout image. Highlighting iconic SpongeBob imagery in a new way by combining it with classic art influences, we gave our content a fresh twist. By leaning into our amazing artist inventory and trending topics, we can consistently bring fans new ways to enjoy Nickelodeon’s longest running series.

Strategy and Execution

So, how do we keep our ever-growing SpongeBob fandom entertained while also bringing in new fans to the animation genre? We delve into our talented artist database! By combining Nickelodeon’s unique ability to bring in talented designers and leveraging an annual trending summer topic the iconic SpongeBob Popsicle, we’ve created custom artwork unlike anything our fans have seen. With this image being a new rendition on the classic painting “The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dalí, we promote SpongeBob not as just a brand but as a part of history. SpongeBob’s status as meme royalty is no accident, and with creative social content keeping him top-of-mind, he’ll continue to not only melt popsicles but melt hearts.

Results

Fans ate up the popsicle painting like a fresh scoop straight from the ice cream parlor. While it overperformed on both Instagram and Facebook, Twitter in particular took to the piece, maximizing its success with 6 million impressions, 141k likes (2400% above our monthly retweets benchmark), and 13k retweets (3300% above our monthly likes benchmark). Organic success on Twitter is never an easy feat, but by taking advantage of trending topics, cheeky humor, and Nickelodeon’s artistic legacy, we’ve found we can make a splash. With each viral piece, we continue to position SpongeBob as a cultural mainstay nearly a quarter of a century after his introduction.

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Nickelodeon

Links

Entry Credits