Objectives

What do you do when your competition shells out billions on advertising and celebrity endorsements? Simple. You give your product to their customers, and make them the celebrities.

Ok, it's not that simple, but that's the spirit behind Swift and HTC's Creatography influencer campaign.

OBJECTIVE

Increase awareness of the flagship HTC One smartphone outside of HTC's tech fanboys.

STRATEGY

Embracing the independent spirit of the HTC brand, we thought… let's find a like-minded creator. Better yet, let's find three. Five. Or more. Let's ask them to push the phone to its creative limits, and watch what happens.

But, who? Swift interviewed dozens nationwide, settling on a team of 7. (When your group includes a mad scientist, basement dancing sensation, viral filmmakers, and style photographers, choosing one is hard).

It's also really hard to pull off. In 10 weeks, we criss-crossed the globe, creating video profiles, and briefing each influencer to create content for their own channels — using only the HTC One.

OUTCOME

The results were stratospheric — literally. (YouTube celeb Colin Furze sent the phone into space). Our influencers authored more than 100 pieces of content to 5.4 million fans, reaching 34 million feeds across Instagram, Vine, and YouTube, which ignited an 81% increase in overall reach of HTC social content. To date, their content has been shared more than 36,000 times. Creatography influencers inspired 3,000 fans to submit to become the 8th Creatographer. Brand effects studies shows 7% lift in brand favorability among target demographic.

Strategy and Execution

Let's face it, in both perception and practice, many influencer efforts are pretty see-through. Wave some money, and get a quick, fleeting burst. They're transactional, not authentic. And they don't move the needle.

HTC's Creatography program was revolutionary — and worthy of this award — for turning these notions on their head in several ways:

• We engaged not with one influencer, but a team of of 7 across the globe (plus an eighth we crowdsourced). All in a narrow 10-week time frame.

• We went deep. We produced mini-documentaries for each, and secured 3-month content commitments from them to fuel a robust content calendar. This was no short burst.

• We made sure the product, not simply the influencer, remained the hero. Every piece of content — video or photo — was shot on the HTC One. Key features of the phone were matched to specific influencers. For instance, to showcase the phone's rich speakers (Boomsound) we enlisted Vine dance sensation Amy Marie Gaertner to groove to ambient music amplified only by the phone. Photographers Our Wild Abandon pushed the device's new manual camera features (such as Split Capture). Musician Mark Flesch even created original mixes using the HTC One's new ringtones.

• We got iPhone and Samsung fans to not just switch, but embrace the product. Style curators Street Etiquette, for example, whose brand lives on Instagram, used the #Creatography and #HTCOneM8 hashtags over 90 times with their content, 80 times more than they had contractually agreed to. Our Wild Abandon raved — unprompted — on Instagram, "Shot in manual with our #HTCOneM8, love how the phone retains the detail in the highlights." The influencers showed genuine love for the product, and it carried through into the creative they produced. Filmmaker Scott Winn shot a 3-minute music video on the phone — with the phone as a central character. Inventor Colin Furze put the device at the center of a fireworks show 100,000 feet high.

All this added up to a more authentic form of influence, and the results were stratospheric. Our influencers authored more than 100 pieces of content to 5.4 million fans, reaching 34 million feeds across Instagram, Vine, and YouTube, which ignited an 81% increase in overall reach of HTC social content. To date, their content has been shared more than 36,000 times. Creatography influencers inspired 3,000 fans to submit to become the crowdsourced 8th Creatographer. Brand effects studies shows 7% lift in brand favorability among target demographic (18-24 year olds).

Phew.

Media