Webby Winner: Best Bot
Messenger and Instagram were combining forces in the biggest change to DM’s ever. The problem? Teens LOVE DMs just as they are.
To fight a “why is FB all up in my DMs” reaction, we enlisted Cardi B, to spill the tea using the product itself. With the help of a chat bot, users could DM Cardi for a “New Year’s Read,” an inspirational reading using all the new features of the messenger product to show off its superpowers.
Getting the word out
To seed the activation, a series of short mysterious invitations flooded Instagram and Cardi’s social channels, generating an incredible groundswell of organic press in places teens actually care about.
From niche music blogs to the celebrity twittersphere, people were posting their reads, sharing the tea not only about the year ahead, but about how damn cool the new update was.
The real win though? Opt in exceeded goals and folks in our hold out groups were begging for the update, ensuring the new DMs would stay as central to the teen experience as ever.
While Cardi was the headliner, two additional campaigns pre and post, grounded in feature awareness, bookended the experience.
We tapped some of Instagram's most well known and loved Creators, like Avanni Gregg, Bretman Rock and Ricky Thompson, in fly on the wall conversations that acted as product demonstrations.
A third campaign shot remotely with emerging Creators, highlighted the power of the new experience through simple, clever, visuals designed to stop people in their tracks on Stories and in Feed.