NBCUniversal employees have many unique career opportunities throughout the year. Regardless of their role, our employees across the enterprise have the chance behind the scenes to be a part of iconic tentpole company events.
With these two pieces of content, we wanted to highlight events that our employees were able to volunteer for that we call 'Uniquely NBCU' experiences.
In 2023, NBCU employees across the portfolio volunteered to work alongside the Bravo team at the third annual BravoCon, a 3-day event in Las Vegas where fans and more than 160 ‘Bravoleberties’ spent the weekend partaking in various themed experiences, curated panels, meet and greets, and so much more. This gave employees a unique opportunity to leverage their Bravo fandom by being a part of the historic event.
Another 'Uniquely NBCU' moment was the 97th annual Macy’s Day parade. The parade is a longstanding NBC broadcast and an incredible tradition in New York City. Giving our employees the chance to capture behind the scenes action at the iconic broadcast programs offered social audiences a different POV than what they saw elsewhere.
For both pieces of content, we followed a similar execution plan for employees participating in the video creation. All employees received a structured brief explaining our ask, production specifics for capturing content, and reference videos with how we envisioned the final product. Once employees captured content, it was sent back to us and edited together into 90 second reels.
Since this content was mainly shared from the @NBCUniversal corporate Instagram handle, we used the collaboration feature to partner with our brand accounts, including @Bravo (and their 2.3M followers) on the BravoCon content, and @WorkAtNBCU, our careers-focused social account, for the parade reel. A key point of our strategy was distribution through collaboration – we wanted to ensure that we could get these videos in front of the widest and most relevant audiences.
BravoCon:
We had employees working in all facets of BravoCon, from staffing talent, overseeing advertising partners, managing the merchandise bazaar, capturing social/digital content, and more. To correctly highlight the breadth of employee participation and opportunity, we worked with Bravo to identify staff members that would be the best fit to bring each angle of the event to life. We connected with that select group of employees ahead of BravoCon for helpful pre-event planning.
Thanksgiving Day:
The Thanksgiving Day Parade challenged us as we had less versatility with content opportunities. Unlike BravoCon, employees at the parade were all stationed in very similar posts and had similar POVs. To counter this and achieve a more all-encompassing final reel, we asked employees to focus on different moments in the parade including the balloon handler training, talent performances, and other engaging events that stood out and would give social users an alternative behind the scenes view.
From both a storytelling perspective and sentiment perspective, these reels were successes. NBCUniversal’s corporate social channels are unique in that we can highlight both the company’s business priorities and an employee experience in one piece of content.
With BravoCon and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast, we showed a behind-the-scenes look at how NBCUniversal’s businesses pull off such spectacular events and showed it all through the eyes of the employees who make it happen.
As a byproduct of this authentic storytelling, we saw great success with the sentiment around each piece of content. This approach led us to find untapped stories, despite there already being hundreds of pieces of content covering each event. We saw unique engagement on each reel as noted below. The two reels saw significantly more watch time than our average reels, and included notable engagements from Meta, Macy’s, event attendees, fans of our brands, current employees and prospective talent.
