2025 brought us the 30th anniversary of the Pixar film that started it all - Toy Story! To celebrate this iconic franchise, Pixar social hosted a year-long celebration that included everything from relevant and relatable social content to influencer partnerships and mailers, high-profile consumer product collections, a hosted creator day at Pixar Animation Studio, CapCut Templates, duettable videos, and more.
Our goals for this campaign were to ignite nostalgia for fans that grew up with Toy Story, bridge the gap between original fans and younger audiences, and create anticipation for the upcoming release of Toy Story 5. The four target audiences we aimed to connect with throughout this campaign were Gen Z, Millennials, Core Toy Story Fans, and Animation Fans at large. And even more than just these business goals and target audiences, we wanted to do right by the millions of Toy Story fans that have brought this movie into their hearts, and give them an opportunity to celebrate how much this film and these characters mean to them!
We knew that getting Toy Story’s 30th anniversary celebration right was extremely important because Toy Story is Pixar’s first film and ultimately set the tone for what Pixar Animation Studio would become. With that in mind, we carefully crafted an extensive strategy to bring this campaign to life across all of Pixar social media. The foundation of the campaign was to highlight the friendship, adventure, and magic at the heart of the Toy Story films, while supporting tentpole priorities across The Walt Disney Company and creating excitement around the franchise leading up to Toy Story 5 in 2026.
As you can imagine, it was a challenge to juggle priorities and stakeholders across the whole company, ensuring that partners from consumer products to Disney Parks felt like they had equal support on the Pixar social channels, all while programming our own robust content slate. We strategically prioritized content that we knew would resonate with our audiences, and ultimately saw great success in what we supported cross-functionally (hello Lotso Crocs and Woody rocking Levis!).
The Pixar social content strategy was built around four thematic pillars, and all of our custom content and activations laddered up to one or more of the below buckets.
Creators were also a key component in our anniversary celebration! We planned and executed a full day of Toy Story-inspired activities for 10 influencers at Pixar Animation Studio. We invited them onto Campus for an exclusive conversation with Pete Docter and other Toy Story filmmakers, a tour of the Pixar Archives, and a drawing tutorial with Buzz Lightyear’s Character Designer, Bob Pauley. We even created a scavenger hunt that ended at the voice recording booth for influencers to step into the film and record themselves as Buzz and Woody! The influencers had an incredible experience and were able to share their love of the film with their audiences.
Fans had the best time celebrating 30 years of Toy Story! With a strong strategy and platform-native content slate, our year-long anniversary campaign earned over 8M total engagements and over 146M video views. The campaign got fans talking, generating 123K social mentions (95% positive sentiment) focused on love for the franchise and Pixar’s emotional storytelling, along with nostalgic memories from childhood.
From an influencer perspective, we saw impressive engagement with our fans and creators! Across the exclusive influencer trip to the Pixar Campus and custom mailers, we garnered 25M impressions and 375K engagements in over 279 influencer posts.
Outside of the campaign’s numerical performance, that we’re extremely proud of, we also saw incredible stories and UCG content shared of how much this story means to people, both in our comment section and on fans’ own social media. Overall, we’re so grateful that fans loved celebrating this beloved film franchise with us throughout 2025, and we look forward to the next 30 years - to infinity and beyond!
