For UPS, the holiday season is the busiest time of the year. As shipping volumes reach their peak, so do people’s expectations. We needed a solution for managing customer demands that would help keep the conversation around the brand positive on social media.
Wishes Delivered is a social campaign that is more than just simple marketing: it has become a platform for the brand to lend a hand in its community and tell authentic, heartfelt stories that truly connect with people and make them feel something real. The objectives of the campaign went beyond the typical social engagements, focusing on brand sentiment lift and social sharing to spread our incredible stories across the social web.
The strategy for the 2018 Wishes Delivered campaign was two-fold: create touching human stories that resonate with audiences, and sharing those stories in a fluid yet focused social media plan. To find our stories, we looked at the topics driving current social conversations
Creatively, the campaign centered around four incredible stories of good:
Little Girl, Big Future told the story of Parson Blue Herrington, who was born with a number of health challenges causing her to spend her first few years in and out of the Texas Children’s Hospital. To give back, her family started a book and toy drive for other sick kids. That’s when Parson met UPS driver, Miss Tammy. Thanks to Tammy, Parson spent a day learning the ropes at UPS and helping deliver packages. It was an unforgettable day that ended with Parson’s own tiny UPS truck and the knowledge that she can be anything she wants to be when she grows up.
When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, Mavel lost nearly everything, including her home. Mavel opened a small warehouse and distributed aid and supplies to her neighbors in need after the hurricane had passed. A group of UPS volunteers spent the day helping reorganize Mavel’s warehouse into a fully stocked hub for supplies and aid. While Mavel was at the warehouse, the UPS team surprised her by filling her empty house with new furniture, decor, and appliances, transforming the once-damaged house into a home.
A Wish For Friendship told the heartwarming story of a little girl, determined to ensure no child is ever lonely. Sammie’s Buddy Bench Project began with a simple wish: that everyone has a friend and no one ever feels left out. When Sandra, a teacher more than 700 miles away, heard about Sammie and the Buddy Benches, she knew she had to get one for her school. Sammie teamed up with UPS and flew to New York to surprise Sandra’s students with their very own Buddy Bench.
And a Soldier’s Wish reunited Lily, an active duty U.S. service member who just returned after three tours in the Middle East, with the pup she rescued while serving overseas. She named the dog Kelby, which means “my dog” in Arabic. UPS teamed up with SPCA-I to reunite Kelby and Lily in the US, and also funded the reunions of three more dogs from overseas with their active duty soldiers.
In addition to traditional long-form storytelling, we created a variety of shareable, social-first pieces of content suitable for scrolling the newsfeed. This gave our audience multiple ways to consume our content, helped extend the life of each story, and allowed us to prioritize the best-performing content on each channel and optimize media spend.
The execution of our media plan was thoughtful. Daily reporting kept the client on top of the progress toward our goals and allowed our team to make recommendations on how to shift media dollars based on each post’s performance.
Our relevant story topics combined with our agile publishing approach helped us outperform past years’ benchmarks with our best results to date. We monitored the results on a weekly basis and optimized creative, publishing and bidding on a weekly basis. In total, our 6-week campaign produced 278,000+ shares, 28MM+ video views, 130M impressions, and 330K social positive interactions.
