Shimmer and Shine is a hit preschool series on Nickelodeon featuring a little girl named Leah and her twin genies-in-training named Shimmer and Shine. Each day, Shimmer and Shine grant Leah three wishes. These often have hilarious, unintended results, but the three best friends grow and learn from these mishaps by working together.
Less than a week after the show's linear premiere, parents and fans were already pinning their own Shimmer and Shine-inspired accessories and other crafts on Pinterest. We wanted to capitalize on this emerging passion for the show and its unique style, while expanding awareness with a new group of parents and potential fans. In the spirit of working together, the Nickelodeon social media team partnered with the consumer products, CRM, and special events teams to create an exciting opportunity for fans: the chance to show off their creativity and inspire a real-life Shimmer and Shine bedroom.
In addition to spreading awareness about the show, this initiative aimed to turn parents into brand ambassadors on Pinterest, a new channel in our suite of marketing tools that has strong parent affinity.
In order to achieve our objective of engaging parents around Shimmer and Shine on Pinterest, we reached out directly to recruit pinners with overlapping interests, as well as active members of the Nick Jr. Fan Club. We invited this group to pin inspirational images that would influence our designers as they built a real-life Shimmer and Shine bedroom. This design would also potentially impact the Nickelodeon consumer products roadmap.
Nickelodeon provided only a few source images from the show, but parents quickly absorbed its beautiful aesthetic and found their own ways to express how Shimmer and Shine could fit into their lifestyles.By pinning, hundreds of parents became brand ambassadors and made their mark on different directions we could take this property.
After about two weeks, the Nickelodeon special events team went through the board, drawing ideas from the hundreds of pins. They designed a real-life version of a "Dreamy Genie Bedroom" that any fan would wish for, exhibited at the Viacom Headquarters in New York City. The bedroom exhibit also featured a tablet that displayed the Pinterest board and explained that the room was based on pins by the Shimmer and Shine fan community. We then posted photos of the exhibit on the Pinterest board, thanking parents and fans for their incredible input. As an added bonus, fans will be delighted to see how their decisions influenced the design of our home goods products, available July 2016.
When we began our effort to recruit parents who were potential fans of Shimmer and Shine, we immediately received almost 1,000 requests to join the board, resulting in more than 850 pins. These pins formed the backbone of the special events team's design of the real-life "Dreamy Genie Bedroom.
The board now has 213 guest pinners and over 1,000 pins. We saw a 17% increase in Pinterest monthly viewers and Pinterest engagement during the activation period. Average daily impressions increased 11.9%, while daily repins increased by 27% in just two weeks.
We experienced a remarkable increase in both the number and the specificity of searches for Shimmer and Shine, demonstrating that we had accomplished our objective of increasing awareness of the show and brand on Pinterest. Shortly after the board went live, we started noticing the first Shimmer and Shine party planning boards by individual parents, showing that our parent engagement tactics had been highly effective.
