It was December 2021 – the world was still in the throes of the pandemic and a return to normalcy felt out of grasp. Richard Attias & Associates (RA&A), a strategic communication firm specializing in high-profile live experiences, was pondering the classic year-end question: What would be our New Year’s message? What was the first thing that we wanted to tell our global audience in 2022? For our Executive Chairman Richard Attias, the answer was clear: “There are many reasons to be optimistic about 2022.”
From medical miracles to advances in the green transition to the triumph of the human spirit at the Olympics, our “Best Wishes for 2022” digital card was a well-researched 1-minute video that inspired optimism about the year ahead by reflecting on the best of 2021. This video’s success led to a full series which included: “Hopeful Signs of the Year of the Tiger 2022,” “Earth Day 2022: Celebrating Positive Strides That Are Being Taken to Protect Our Planet,” and “International Women's Day 2022: Inspiring Examples of Global Female Leadership.”
Optimism is integral to RA&A’s DNA. We are privileged to produce top global summits and curate influential platforms – such as Future Investment Initiative, Hegra Conference of Nobel Laureates, Sync Digital Wellbeing Summit, One Planet Summit – that seek to foster dialogue to drive positive impact and catalyze global cooperation. We're proud that our “Inspiring Signs” video series on social media is one more way that we are spreading our optimism about a brighter future for all.
Since 2019, Richard Attias & Associates has produced a "Global Issues" social media video series on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These are 90-second, text-on-screen videos about the greatest challenges facing the world today, and they allow RA&A to join in on the online conversation on trending topics. While these videos often have an uplifting thread and point out positive aspects, they are meant to be conversation starters (#WeNeedToTalk), stir action (#WeNeedToAct), show opportunity and progress (#WeNeedToLead) and encourage generosity (#WeNeedToShare). But the "Inspiring Signs for a Brighter Future" video series is meant to have a different feel -- the goal is to overwhelmingly evoke optimism not through "toxic positivity" but through careful research and curation of the most positive elements: #WeNeedToInspire. After we produced the New Year's video, we knew that we needed to create additonal inspiring videos throughout the year, guided by the news cycle.
All of RA&A's videos are researched with the highest journalist standards and use real Getty editorial imagery. A good example of our editorial strategy for this series is how we looked into the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and discovered that there were so many positive aspects, even if the media was painting a different picture. Our "Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics - Why These Olympic Games Are Making History" pointed out that this is the most gender-balanced Olympic Winter Games yet (45% of all athletes are women), Erin Jackson became the first Black woman to win an individual gold at the Winter Olympics, and Richardson Viano was the first athlete to represent Haiti at the Winter Olympics.
For International Women's Day, we felt that this video was so important that we translated it into Spanish and French, as RA&A has a rich history organizing major events in Francophone Africa (including the recent Lome Cybersecurity Summit and the 2019 African Games Opening Ceremony). Our International Women's Day video celebrated the women who rose to leadership positions since IWD 2021, such as Xiomara Castro becoming the President of Honduras and Mirjana Spoljaric becoming the first female president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Our "Inspiring Signs" series ended up with 7 original video concepts for a total of 12 videos 2022: New Year's (2 versions), Year of the Tiger, International Women's Day (also in French and Spanish), Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, 5 Key Takeways from the World Happiness Report (also in French and Spanish), Earth Day 2022, and Scientific Innovations in 2022 That Will Lead to a Healthier Future.
The "Inspiring Signs for a Brighter Future" video series (12 videos total) was a great success and achieved more than 1 million views across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in 2022. On YouTube, there were nearly 250,000 views and 4,300 watch hours. On Twitter, the videos received 535 likes, 72 retweets, and 210,000 views.
The individual videos truly resonated with the audience. On YouTube, the average percentage viewed was very high for "Year of the Tiger" video (74%) and "Scientific Innovations" (70%). On Twitter, our French version of the "International Women's Day" video garnered 101 likes, 11 retweets and more than 18,000 views. On Facebook, "Scientific Innovations in 2022 That Will Lead to a Healthier Future" acheived 279,000 views and 465 likes.
The world has largely moved past the pandemic, but we still live in an era of unpredictability and recurrent crises. Yet we at RA&A believe there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic, and so we will continue with our "Inspiring Signs" video series as we uphold one of our firm's core tenets: #WeNeedToInspire.
