Vincent NG
I talk about how much I love Pinterest, but the truth is, I don’t love Pinterest, I love creativity. After all Pinterest is just a tool. It’s a way that we’re able to share content, and get inspired. While Pinterest is wonderful, creative marketing inspires me to whole new heights, and I hope it does for you too.
There are aspects of creative marketing that are vital to social media marketing. A lot of social media marketing talks about customer engagement, and how to grow your following and all that jazz, but for me creative marketing content is king, queen, and a side of bacon. That’s how good it is, because instead of you engaging with others to start a conversation, your marketing piece becomes the conversation.
And in this blog post I want to share with you three award winning Pinterest marketing campaigns that stretch the imagination. It stretches how to integrate Pinterest with your other marketing channels. It will stretch your imagination on how you view your business and what’s possible with Pinterest, and it will give you insight that it’s not always just about the number of followers.
UNIQULO: Hair-do
Award: Interactive Bronze Pencil with the One Club
UNIQLO, a Japanese fashion wear company, was looking to launch it’s new LifeWear line. The goal of the campaign was to showcase UNIQLO the off the fall and winter 2014 fashion line and how their LifeWear line could be part of every day life.
Projector, the marketing agency in charge of the project decided on two main marketing channels to promote the new set of the clothes. They used Pinterest as well as create UNIQLO’s website as the marketing channels.
Since DIY hairsytles was and still is an extremely hot area of interest on Pinterest, Projector decided to integrate these DIY hair tutorials with UNIQLO’s clothes. Projector wanted to provide Pinterest users, and fashionistas, not just how to create a hairstyle visuals, but to also allow them to know what types of clothes from UNIQLO would match those hair styles. This allowed viewers to see what could look like from head to toe, providing a holistic approach to fashion.
They created 16 DIY hairstyles that were step by step that showcased off the hairstyles as well as UNIQLO’s line of clothes. They created these DIY tutorials on their website, with most of them being static, but one of the pannels moved like an animated gif. and also had the pin button on them to make them easily pinnable.
What’s makes this such a creative campaign is that it made use of both the front view as well as the back view of what was going on, giving it that extra oomph in creativity and helping it stand out from other DIY hair style pins.
Results:
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the results for this marketing campaign. But there’s a special bonus at the end that another great marketing campaign done by UNIQLO. Definitely worth watching.
Lesson for Businesses:
While UNIQLO doesn’t specialize in hair styles or even hairstyle products, they were able to integrate their products into another hot topic, hairstyles. By merging the two together they were able to form a type of pin that would appeal both to those looking to learn about new hairstyles and for those that were also interested in fashion. You may feel there’s a time to create new kick asss Pinterest marketing strategy, and create new boards and types of pins.
Determine the type of pins and visuals that will be of use to that new audience you’re trying to reach and remain relevant to the old one. This will help you reach new users on Pinterest and keep your brand and what it stands for going strong.
Honda’s Pintermission:
PR Daily’s Digital PR and Social Media Awards Best Use of Pinterest 2012
While I’m aware that this Pinterset campaign is from a while back, and a lot has changed since this campaign has ran, such as rules by the FTC to disclose sponsored pinning, and the use of the word stricter rules of using “Pin” in social media branding. The trouble is that sponsored pinning is a bit of a grey area.
Honda was to launch the CR-V on Pinterest, and they did so through their #Pintermission campaign. The campaign was to promote the CRV and get young people to go out and live their life, and to do so they contacted five influential pinners and challenged them not to pin for 24 hours. On top of that they would receive $500 to go and do something that they pinned.
In a strange way, Honda was helping Pinterest carry out it’s mission which was to help inspire people to go out and actually do what they pin.
The campaign asked each pinner to take a 24 hour break from Pinterest.
The Results:
More than 4.6 million people were exposed to the #Pintermission boards, which produced more than 5,000 repins and almost 2,000 likes. Additionally, more than 16 million media impressions were garnered from the campaign.
Lesson for Businesses:
I really enjoy Pinterest a lot, but I believe that Pinterest can be integrated with real life activities. If you’re using Pinterest as your main platform, that’s great, but can you find a way to incorporate offline elements with Pinterest as well. Can be more than just a resource for your audience, and instead, create an experience with them. People may remember a pin that you pinned, but the reality is that people will remember and discuss a meaningful experience long after it all over.
The other lesson that can be learned is that, creative marketing with Pinterest can become a great news story. With this unique approach they were able to garner media attention. The question you have to ask yourself, is there a way to create an engaging campaign that would be of interest to both an online and offline audience that involves Pinterest?
MasterCard #AcceptanceMatters
Finalists for the 2014 Shorty Awards for the Pinterest Category
Okay so I lied a bit, this wasn’t an award winning campaign, but it is one that it was a finalists for a Shorty award. And I have a soft spot for advertising campaigns that promote tolerance and acceptance for gays, lesbians, and people of all backgrounds.
Mastercard, the credit card company, launched a branding message about acceptance. On one level it was promoting, the message is about how its credit card is accepted by businesses all over the world, but it also wanted to extend its message about acceptance of people. And so MasterCard started a conversation around this theme that started around June 2013 during the NYC Pride Parade.
MasterCard was looking to expand their conversation of #AcceptanceMatters, and found that since Pinterest was a natural place to spread positive messages and messages of kindness, R/GA of New York, the marketing agency behind the Pinterest marketing campaign.
MasterCard had zero followers when it started this Pinterest campaign, and in order to help grow i’s presence, it partnered up with Pinterest influencers who were interested in spreading their #AcceptanceMatters message and pins. The pins would also link back to a Facebook contest hosted by MasterCard that asked users to submit photos through a Facebook contest app that showed what acceptance was. Pinterest assisted in 2000 user photos being uploaded for Mastercard’s Facebook contest.
Master Card #Acceptance Matters – Award Winning Pinterest Marketing Campaigns
The Results:
The results of the campaign led to 24.5 million potential impressions, 13,000 repins in 9 weeks. Mastercard, which had no followers to begin with gained 171 followers during the time of the campaign.
Lesson For Businesses:
What do you want your brand to be known for? One of the biggest mistakes that businesses can make is not staying on brand. But it’s also important for people to see the human side of your brand. What does your company value? Other than making a profit, what else is it doing to make the world a better place? Rise up, and inspire your Pinterest followers.
The other lesson is the power in working with influencers. You may not have a large following, but if you partner up with influencers, you’re able to get a much larger reach and to potentially reach millions in a few short weeks. While you can not pay a pinner to pin specific content, you can always collaborate with pinners to help promote a message that will inspire others.
BONUS CAMPAIGN:
UNIQLO Storms Pinterest
Gold Lion Winner for Design at Cannes 2013
This is truly an amazing Pinterest marketing campaign, imaginative, very cool, and can no longer be done. When this campaign first started, which was created by Firstborn New York, the dreaded “Expand Pin” area was not part of Pinterest yet. But the goal was very simple. Introduce UNIQLO, a Japanese clothing brand to the American market. And to do it with no paid media, meaning they couldn’t buy advertisements on TV, radio, print or web. Everything had to be created.
This resulted in taking advantage of the never ending pins, and creating a mosaic of pins that lined up and formed perfect images across the screen. This created a mural effect that got people to notice. I could show you a pin or a visual, but in all honesty, the video has more impact.
Results of the Campaign:
UNIQLO garnered 55 million media impressions and more than 6 million mentions on Twitter. (Now that’s crazy!) On June 26, 2012, “UNIQLO+Pinterest” was mentioned once every 2 minutes across digital media platforms, and the campaign was covered by 64 media outlets. Prominent blogs such as Mashable, AdAge and Business Insider kept the project in the spotlight, contributing to 37 million media impressions.
Lesson For Businesses:
Though you won’t be able to conduct something similar, I hope it inspires you to step outside the boundaries of what you may feel is possible with Pinterest. To get you to think creatively, be bolder, and to try marketing techniques on the social network that no one else has tried before, but of course you still need to understand the small technicalities of how to use Pinterest and be on your way to becoming a Pinterest expert, my buddy Mitt Ray does a good job of compiling excellent Pinterest articles to read.
You will love this video and the imagination behind it.
http://www.firstborn.com/work/featured/21/uniqlo-storms-pinterest
