Best use of Instagram in Social Media - Shorty Awards

13th Annual Shorty Awards Categories

The Shorty Awards honor the talented agencies, brands, and industry leaders behind the best and most innovative work on social media and digital channels, campaigns, websites and applications.

From the 8th Annual Shorty Awards Best use of Instagram

This award honors the best use of Instagram for a campaign, post or project. Describe how you integrated Instagram into your campaign, how it enhanced your message and how it met or exceeded your goals and objectives.

Winner

Beats By Dre Straight Outta Compton

Beats by Dre partnered with Universal Pictures to promote Straight Outta Compton, a film about Beats' founder, Dr. Dre, and his life and career in Compton. Our goal was to start a global conversation that would generate interest in the film before it's release in August, 2015. We also set to demonstrate that Dr. Dre's phenomenal career and origin …

Finalists

The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon engages with our viewers and fans all day, every day. The show airs for an hour every weeknight, but our social accounts are active around-the-clock, providing exclusive video, unique peeks behind the scenes, and bonus materials that act as an extension of the show itself. This year we focused on three areas …

#ChooseToStart with Moto E (Motorola Global Device Launch)

While smartphones have changed the way we connect with the world, millions of people across the globe still can't afford one. Motorola, who believes access to the mobile Internet should be a choice, not a privilege, has made it its brand mission to change that with Moto E, a new class of smartphone tailored for those looking for access to life's p…

BBC Earth 500px Instagram Takeover

500px is a global online photography community. The company has over 7 million users worldwide. BBC Earth seeks to inspire you by sharing the incredible wonders of our universe. BBC Earth's followers on Instagram and 500px followers are very closely aligned, lovers and photographers of beautiful imagery, including with a focus on photos of nature …

Don't Like & Drive

The most important side of everything Ford does is People. Without them, there wouldn't be technology, nor the need for it. That's why the brand is always trying to create solutions in favor of the human being.One of today's problems is the use of social media while driving. 4 out of 10 drivers admit to having done it before. It's becomes twice as…

Reynolds Wrap has been helping people make delicious meals for over 70 years, but they were lacking relevancy among a younger target. As a way to reinvigorate the brand, we decided to tap into this demographic—and the sphere in which they spend the most time—social media. Because of the large cooking community and flourishing foodie culture that e…

Saturday Night Live: SNL 40

From the moment George Carlin took the stage of Studio 8H in 1975 for the show's first monologue, to Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake's musical retrospective that opened the show 40 years later, Saturday Night Live has remained one of the most social shows on television.SNL's television and social evolution hit its peak on February 15, 2015 as t…

Slurpee Tastes Like...

Leading into summer, Slurpee launches Flavour Fest in 7-Eleven across Australia: a 13-week festival of taste where a new flavour is introduced each week. We were tasked to create 'FOMO' and sustain awareness using social to help Slurpee stand-out in a market full of impersonators.However, you can't see what Slurpee tastes like. There are no visibl…

The Voice hits all the right notes, but what's happening on social really sets The Voice apart. The show is built from the ground up to have the most consequential, entertaining social experience on television. Fans expect nothing less from the show that pioneered Social TV.With that legacy in mind, each season we ask how we can make that Social T…

Nominees

To increase engagement by letting our craziest fans shape a choose-your-own-adventure tale through comments on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

#WmagModelSearch

W Magazine was looking for a new top model on Instagram. The winner of the model search, which was held in partnership with Instagram and IMG Modeling Agency and supported by Coach, would appear in the September Issue of W Magazine, in a fashion story shot by photographer Mario Sorrenti and styled by W's creative fashion and style director Edward Enninful. …

120 Ways NY is Wild

When you think of the "wild" aspects of New York City, a family of gorillas doesn't usually come to mind, does it?However, when the Wildlife Conservation Society was looking to celebrate 120 years of saving wildlife while raising awareness and traffic to their parks, we wanted to do just that. After 20 years of stagnant traffic, they were looking to be top …

Accord Throwbacks

In August 2015, Honda launched the restyled 2016 Accord. As one of Honda's most beloved models, the Accord has become an expression of Honda as a brand. We needed to create a campaign that not only promoted what made the 2016 Accord special but also spoke to Honda's heritage and appealed to drivers of every-generation Accord.

Air Canada Inaugural Flights

There's something to be said about the celebration of travelling to new destinations. In a modern world where travel has become an adventure and an opportunity for new experiences, the launch of new routes represents another opportunity to connect Canadians and the world.Inspired by the enthusiasm and love of new destinations, we launched a social program t…

Best Use of Instagram: Tyrant Mosaic Mural

As we set out to promote the second season of the action-drama Tyrant on social media, we wanted to engage existing fans and lure new ones by catching them up on the major plot points of season one. In order to do so in a fresh and exciting way, we built an interactive "Recap Mural" on Instagram. The concept made beautiful use of our arresting key art in a …

DSW 12 Days of Converse

To reach new and non customers/followers via influencers with a large reach on our priority social channel.To engage with influencers in a thoughtful way – letting them be themselves, while still delivering something interesting and meaningful for DSW.To surprise & delight our fans during a busy & cluttered holiday season with a new & fresh take on gift giv…

Dashner’s Top 5: Instagram Videos

Reach core fans of the Maze Runner film franchise by providing them with personal commentary about the film from the author of the novels - James Dashner, while leveraging Dashner's massive social presence.

Delta Gift Guide

-Drive awareness of the Delta Gift Card as an alternative to traditional gifts and more mainstream gift cards.-Appeal to the primary purchasers of Delta Gift Cards: men and women, 25-40 years old.-Provide marketing support to drive toward a 50% sales increase over 2014. (Think lots of zeroes.)

Give fans a window into the world of Style, featuring fashion, DIYs, news, and beauty for the Disney fan.

Evangelizing Invention: GE Instagram

General Electric has been creating wonderfully informative and entertaining content for over a century. However, five years ago, the company was challenged with bringing their narrative to life digitally. Our relationship with GE began with a revamp of their internal news platform, GE Reports. Subsequently, we launched GE's Instagram page with the objectiv…

Every Witch Way S4 “Flock to Unlock" Instagram Stunt

Kick-start super fan conversation for the fourth and final season of Nickelodeon's hit series, Every Witch Way.

Fun, Inspiring Sweet Treats on Instagram

Mouthwatering desserts, beautifully decorated cakes, brightly colored sweet treats – it's all just a taste of Wilton's Instagram. Since Instagram is one of the fastest growing social platforms and exceedingly popular with millennials, Wilton's Digital Marketing team placed emphasis on growing the channel's followers in order to reach a new audience. Through…

Gap Girls' Empowerment

Gap has been a stylish and reliable back-to-school destination for decades, but how will it break through the clutter during one of the busiest times of year? As part of a larger celebrity-endorsed campaign in fall 2015, Gap sought to partner with girls (daughters of social content creators) who express their unique voices with the world and encourage othe…

Gravity Rush: The Gravity-Defying Post

To celebrate the launch of Gravity Rush Remastered and highlight the protagonist's ability to control and manipulate the forces of gravity.

Hillside Beach Club CIO

Our target was to find a way to engage our global base and create social media with a reasonable budget. To do that, we created a unique & an entertaining recruitment process, and carried it out on a social medium like Instagram.

How Do You See Yourself?

A 'hidden gem' in Northeast Ohio, Kent State University is a place of discovery, opportunity, and community. Prospective students are attracted to Kent State not only for its programming excellence and exceptional value, but for its genuine sense of place and the welcoming and inclusive atmosphere that spans its eight-campus system.In the fall of 2015, to h…

JCPenney's A+ Instagram Guide for Back-to-School

JCPenney wanted to authentically engage college-bound students on social media during the back-to-school push. PopShorts came up with a creative solution that took full advantage of Instagram's internal linking structure, creating a "JCP Dorm Guide" that lived entirely on Instagram.

Judgement Free Zone

Planet Fitness is known for a lot of things: low prices (and all the stuff you get for those low prices), the Lunk Alarm, and of course, the #JudgementFreeZone (and yes, that's the way we spell "judgement" because, well...we don't judge). Fiercely protective of their Planet and the rights of their members to feel like they belong, they've created an environ…

LG USA Mobile - #BestShotEver

Primary goal: Align the brand with mobile photography and double the mobile photography conversation surrounding LG Mobile. Secondary goal: Create an ownable, repeatable UGC contest to represent LG's commitment to mobile photography.Secondary goal: Create an ownable, repeatable UGC contest to represent LG's commitment to mobile photography.

MailChimp builds powerful email marketing products that empower underdogs. Our fans and customers like us because we help their businesses grow, but also because we're a little weird.We see our Instagram account as a place for our creative team to have fun. Our goals: delight our audience, impress potential recruits, and generally get people excited about o…

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials - The Flare Infection

Fans of the Maze Runner series are obsessed with all things related to Grievers, Gladers, Cranks, and Shanks. And fan influencers lead feverish conversations about them through their social channels.So how do you bring some of those high profile fans onto the Scorch? (the desert-like, post-apocalyptic setting of the film) Give them an exclusive, personalize…

Men's Health Instagram

Our objective was to increase our followers, create an account loaded with serviceable advice and a community of support for men working on living a happy, healthy, fit life.

Mercedes-Benz Photo Pass

Photography is an art of reflection. It's about observing something fascinating and capturing it in a way that's memorable and unique to the artist; the photographer. It has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. Photography offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution. Those are the pr…

Miller Lite Pride Rainbow Post

Miller Lite aims to behave like their audience in social media. Speaking their mind, sharing with friends, making you laugh, making you think. But being relatable is a tall task when you're a big brand with an incredible heritage and have to live by the rules that brands do. The Miller Lite social presence aims to knock down those walls.So when the Supreme …

Monster on Instagram

Overall, Monster's mission is simple: Engage with job seekers and connect them to employers who need great talent. To bring that to life on social media, we focus on creating one-to-one engagement opportunities with job seekers and employers.On Instagram, this is our primary objective. We strive to celebrate those who have job-finding success stories, those…

Panini America #PaniniDunk

During the 2015 Panini NBA Rookie Photo Shoot held last August, we brought more than 30 of the top NBA rookies to New York for the purposes of creating their 2015-16 NBA trading cards. We wanted to take advantage of our access to these young superstars by creating a compelling, Instagram-focused initiative that would have a huge payoff at the end of the day…

Play the Guggenheim

If you could play the Guggenheim... What song would you play?

Qantas Instameet

To celebrate 95 years of flying Australians around the world and home again, Qantas wanted to create events all around the country and showcase the landscapes, cities, and people that feel like home to Australians. We wanted to bring people together, offline, to photograph the beauty in Australia in order to share in that beauty on Instagram. To do this, we…

Red Wax and Relax

Our objective on Instagram was to create a Maker's Mark lifestyle that was true to the heart of the brand and appealing to the 21-30 year old Instagram user base. We initially set out with the goal of reaching 50k followers within a year and gathering and sharing as much user generated content as we could along the way. We wanted to show that Maker's Mark i…

In Rick and Morty, the title characters travel into new worlds each episode through portals that transcend time and space. To build on Rick and Morty's cult following and critical acclaim, Adult Swim sought to ignite their fan-base and reach new potential fans with an interactive social stunt that seeded content in a buzzworthy execution.Adult Swim challeng…

Shangri-La: A World Of Christmas Warmth Campaign

This Christmas, we wanted Shangri-La fans to feel the festive cheer – wherever they were on earth. Simultaneously we also wanted to subtly spread the message of Shangri-La's global footprint, whilst growing their Instagram and WeChat channels and fan following.This meant crossing a myriad of markets and platforms, as well as creating images, videos and a va…

That First Sip of Summer

This summer Sauza Tequila dedicated it's Instagram channel in helping evoke the emotion that comes over someone before taking a sip of something new in the real world. Gone were the days of making it with Cowboy or a Lifeguard. Sauza stepped forward with a bold new look, a bold and contemporary new voice, and some bold new content to inspire a new genera…

The Economist best use of Instagram

By August 2014 The Economist had a strong following on Twitter (5.7 million) and Facebook (4.4 million), but had zero presence on Instagram. Recognising that the social media site was growing at a rapid rate of 23% to 200 million users and that 39% of its audience was under 24 years old, we saw this as an opportunity to:(1) reach a young and growing audien…

The Hyundai SUV Lifestyle Quiz

Our objective was to build awareness around the launch of the new Hyundai Tucson and that Hyundai has multiple SUVs in their lineup.

The Official @BravoTopChef Instagram Handle

Instagram is full of #foodporn. To stand apart in this saturated space, we created a unique food-focused campaign that brought out our fans' inner Top Chef (#Instachef) while driving them to tune in to the show. Given that this was Top Chef's first foray into the Instagram space in its 13 seasons on the air, we wanted to be sure launch with a splash and pos…

There's More To The HR-V

In July 2015, Honda launched their all-new crossover vehicle, the HR-V. It was the perfect car for a younger demographic, with its smaller body, versatile interior and affordable price. We needed to spread awareness of the HR-V by creating a memorable campaign that would leave viewers wanting to learn more.

Introducing Stella McCartney Spring16 collection with Instragram videos

About the Shorty Awards

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media.

Millions of people participate in The Shortys to recognize individuals and organizations producing great content on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, Snapchat, and the rest of the social web.

shorty awards finalists will be announced in mid-march!