AT&T’s DIRECTV has hosted a Super Saturday Night concert the night before the biggest football championship game of the year for 13 years. In 2019, the concert featured Foo Fighters (plus a guest performance); the concert was livestreamed by the AT&T editorial content team so their social audience could experience the event. In order to drive engagement with their audience, AT&T’s community management team, including its agency TruePoint Communications, used community managers to engage with viewers on Twitter with goals that included building brand awareness and securing more engagement opportunities for its client.

The use of community managers and the results the campaign achieved have earned AT&T and TruePoint first place in the “Customer Engagement” category of PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards.

The community management team employed a three-phased approach—before, during and after the concert—designed to deliver an engagement rate higher than 10% on social media and surpassing the event’s 2018 record as the No. 4 trending hashtag on Twitter.

The team began by developing a community manager response guide to ensure messaging would remain on-brand under a variety of scenarios, producing value and positive sentiment for DIRECTV. Highly engaging social media posts developed by the AT&T social media editorial team led up to the event, resulting in nearly 2,000 users across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook contributing positive engagements.

Community managers directed users where to watch, engaging with fans of the artists with GIFs and song lyrics. During the event, the 17 community managers gathered in a “war room” to facilitate communication, problem solving, risk mitigation and status reporting.

After the event, the team maintained an engagement rate of 56%, far surpassing 2018’s 9.3%. And the #SuperSaturdayNight hashtag trended as the No. 1 hashtag on Twitter in the U.S. and worldwide.

Congratulations to AT&T’s Community Management Team, DIRECTV and TruePoint Communications.

Tasked with building local brand recognition, website traffic and social engagement for the Dairy Farmers of Washington, CMD Agency undertook an extensive research effort to decide who a social media content campaign would address. The resulting campaign, launched on Instagram and Pinterest (along with Facebook), has earned CMD first place in the “Content Series” category of PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards.

From Facebook Audiences, CMD learned 2.6 million adults in Washington state use Instagram; 30% are millennial-aged women. With that group selected as the target audience, the team took to tools like Statist and Sysomos to learn that 16% of women age 18–34 list Instagram as their top source for food content, with recipes and food the most popular topics associated with dairy on Instagram. The team also learned that 58% of millennial consumers purchase retail products after discovery on Instagram. Additional research identified Pinterest as the top food content source for millennial women in the state.

The series introduced eight recipes that use Washington dairy products, produced using insights about what people were looking for on each platform. The team worked with a professional recipe developer to ensure the recipes looked and tasted great. Each recipe was shown as a short video; stylized hero images were also produced.

The series rolled out over a few months, supported by paid audience targeting. Engagement benchmarks increased 250% on Facebook; Pinterest daily impressions grew 122,000% and native content achieved 1.6 million impressions.

Congratulations to Steve Seppi, Tara Hastings, Jordan McDonnell, Kelsi Smith, Karen White, Christopher Shults, Natalia Riccardi, Claire Fisher and Andy Cale.

In a healthy snacks marketplace already saturated by well-known brands like Nature Valley, Kellogg’s, Quaker Oats and others, introducing a brand-new healthy protein bar is a huge task. SimplyProtein turned to CRC Agency to help develop a content strategy that would generate awareness for distribution through U.S. retail outlets, build brand talkability and create customer and community engagement that would lead people to want to try a bar, and encourage user-generated content creation. The strategy CRC developed and executed has earned first place in the “Content Marketing Strategy of the Year” category in PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards program.

CRC created #SimplyU, a movement designed to underscore the importance of simple solutions to enhance one’s well-being, energy and lifestyle. At #SimplyU’s core was the opportunity for SimplyProtein to introduce disruptive storytelling to the social media space, along with a sampling campaign and influencer and guerilla marketing efforts.

Social content included creative stop-motion videos, cinemagraphs and storytelling. Influencer outreach and partnerships led to an army of influencers helping promote the brand with assets provided by CRC, including recipe videos, retailer promotions and giveaways.

Half a million samples were distributed in yoga studios, Lululemon stores, music festivals and other public events. Promotional and boosted posts helped grow SimplyProtein’s Facebook following, driving traffic to the websites as well as to brick-and-mortar retail locations.

The interest created by the campaign led to more than 2,000 retailers offering the protein bar, while influencers generated more than 10 million media impressions for the brand.

Congratulations to the 10-person team at CRC Agency for its thorough and effective content marketing strategy.

Ingersoll Rand’s Assembly Power Tools business unit was well positioned for growth, given research finding that companies are committing nearly $1 trillion annually toward greater connectivity and smarter factories, both of which are right in the business unit’s wheelhouse.

The Ingersoll Rand Assembly marketing team knew that thought leadership was an effective approach in this market, leading to the decision to hire Portavoce PR to develop a strategy to achieve the company’s goal of increasing its market share through greater awareness of its advanced, internet-connected tools while breaking down the barriers many customers have to change.

Portavoce’s work has won the “Content Marketing Campaign of the Year” category in PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards.

Portavoce targeted Ingersoll Rand Assembly’s primary sectors of aerospace, heavy truck manufacturing, the motor vehicle industry and general manufacturing with four key strategies: generating editorial coverage; getting writing and placing bylined articles from Ingersoll Rand experts along with blog posts and LinkedIn updates; generating sales leads through paid advertising articles; and amplifying content on LinkedIn with pay-per-click advertising support to drive people to the company website where they would find blog posts and thought leadership articles.

The campaign produced 19 media pickups with nearly 1 million impressions; each story contained key messaging. Meanwhile, LinkedIn posts generated impressive engagement numbers, and nine blog posts generated more than 1,600 page views. Ultimately, the campaign delivered 12,199 leads and nearly $445,000 in sales; estimates suggest actual sales could exceed $4 million.

Congratulations to Adrienne Greene, Jennifer Cronin, Desirae MacGillivray Myers, Cole Zerboni and Hannah Minton.

Sperry undertook a content marketing campaign to introduce consumers to Sperry BIONIC, a collection of the company’s already-popular boat shoes and sneakers made with material spun out of plastic recovered from marine and coastal environments. The campaign to launch Sperry’s partnership with Waterkeeper Alliance and the BIONIC collection has won the “Consumer Products Campaign” category in PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards.

The campaign’s goals included building awareness about the ocean plastics problem, sharing sustainable solutions to protect waters from future pollution, engaging customers and partners to drive change and (of course) to launch the footwear as part of the solution.

The campaign launched on World Water Day and was live through Earth Day in 2019 (March 22 through April 22), during which many of Sperry’s content assets (including profile photos) were updated to feature a special recycling-inspired logo. Social media efforts targeted users of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

Among the campaign’s initiatives were an Instagram takeover; a 60-second animated video titled “Sea to Shoe” (distributed in shorter formats on various social channels, in addition to being used as part of an Instagram Story); paid social media across Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat; GIPHY stickers and GIFs as a fun way to insert Sperry creative into existing conversations on Instagram Stories and Snapchat (the GIFs showcased Sperry’s partnership with a musical artist, Josie Dunne); and influencer outreach to 11 sustainability influencers.

Among other outcomes, Sperry touts the removal of 500,000 plastic water bottles from marine and coastal environments, exceeding the campaign’s goal of 125,000. The campaign also drove a 14% lift in the consumer perception that Sperry “supports causes I care about” compared to the prior season. Engagement rates soared while social media performance exceeded 42 million impressions, 956,000 social video views and 255,000 Snapchat filter shares.

Congratulations to Melissa Romig, Stacy Goodman, Lauren Cary, Julia Shoop, Kate Minner and Edina Sultanik.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is a big, complex organization with offices in 24 countries and 120 communicators and specialists who contribute to 20 different blogs. Over the years, these blogs have been the home to thousands of posts that address specific technical issues within their sector, targeting discrete audiences.

However, the communications team realized that, despite a glut of content, the organization’s primary message had been lost. To correct this, the team undertook a brand journalism effort that has earned first place in the “Brand Journalism” category of PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards.

The channel, “Improving Lives,” is the home of stories of those who have benefited from IDB projects, those building and designing these projects and the knowledge created through the research conducted for these projects.

The first corporate content microsite of the IDB serves the goal of telling the world who the organization is and how its work improves lives in the region. Stories comply with the channel’s slogan, “Stories that trigger change.” Two stories are published weekly, each supported by a full social media strategy for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram.

Each story includes a range of multimedia assets including photos, infographics, videos, audio and interactive elements. Each is produced in both Spanish and English (and sometimes French and Portuguese). Most stories also include a call to action, linking to related materials or courses.

Since its late 2018 launch, 80+ stories have appeared reaching 760,000 views. Of the IDB’s top 25 performing Facebook posts over a recent three-month period, 13 came from Improving Lives. The brand journalism effort has also attained high conversion and retention numbers.

Congratulations to Martin Echenique, Gabriel Garcia, Oscar Hernandez, Richard Solash, Terry-Ann Coley, Andrea Ortega, Anabell Iglesias, José Luis Lobera, and Diego Courchay.

The Life at Cisco blog—one of the best in corporate America—takes the approach that reading a post should be akin to sitting down at a coffee shop and asking a friend how work is going, then telling engaging tales to each other. Although the blog from the Talent Brand team features stories from key hiring areas, the stories shared come almost entirely from employees. This approach has earned Life at Cisco first place in the “Blog” category of PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards. 

Most of the stories posted to Life at Cisco are sourced through social posts shared by employees using the #WeAreCisco hashtag. The team reaches out to employees to ask about the story behind the photo or message they submitted.

The team encourages the employee to write a draft; it provides an outline and a guidelines template, and guides and edits the author, enhancing the story once the employee submits his or her draft. The goal is to maintain the author’s voice in the post.

Authors are part of a Life at Cisco Community + Ambassadors group, which has grown to more than 100 participants who support one another through difficult times and congratulate each other on uplifting moments.

In 2019, the team implemented a tagging strategy based on role, region and topic. The tags are added to the recruiters’ RSS feed in Outlook, so recruiters get an email any time a new post goes live in the tags to which they have subscribed.

The blog continues to deliver for Cisco, with the best performing post of 2017–18 earning 2,304 views and the top month of January 2019 obtaining 18,712 views.

Congratulations to Macy Andrews, Carmen Collins and Casie Shimansky.

There are a limited number of marine ports in the world, most due for a change following a decade of underinvestment. The decision makers in port systems were starting to ask and talk about automation, which was also a growing focus of web searches. These conditions were perfect for Stein IAS, whose client, TM&I, had already invested resources in owning the content space for all things related to ports. The campaign it launched has won first place in the “B2B Services Campaign” category in PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards.   

TM&I leaders speak at industry events, get quoted in articles and produce the most prominent white papers and reports in the business. The company has also built solid relationships through deep research into the key players in the industry.

The effort had several stages. The Smarter Approach positioning and brand creative was designed to set the brand apart from its competitors, leaving no doubt about who leads port technology in the marketplace. The company would continue to lead the global conversation on the subject of port automation.

The demand generation campaign combined thought leadership with media partnership and an evolved digital multichannel approach, starting with a report, “Big Data in the Maritime Industry.” An email campaign promoted follow-up assets to those who had read the report. The campaign well and truly ultimately delivered.

Congratulations to TM&I and Stein IAS.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has not been faring well in Canada, which ranked ninth out of 10 countries in successful AI deployment according to a 2018 assessment. Only 68% of organizations in Canada had adopted AI, behind the global average of 72%. Only 31% of Canadian respondents called their AI implementations a success, compared to 51% globally.

Microsoft Canada, with its significant AI offerings, knew something was needed to kick-start AI in the country, a challenge complicated even more by negative media coverage. How Microsoft chose to tell the story—and how it brought the story to life—has earned the company first place in the “Audio Storytelling” category of PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards.

Based on the rising popularity of podcasts in Canada, the company planned a six-part series on AI (along with a trailer to introduce the series), co-produced in partnership with the Globe and Mail, whose editorial authority would help reach a diverse audience of business leaders, tech enthusiasts and general consumers.

The Microsoft and Veritas Communications team worked closely with the Globe’s content studio to create “AI Meets World,” each episode exploring a distinct facet of AI from a consumer perspective. The series created an accessible look at AI by comparing fictional AI (like the Terminator) to real-world applications.

The PR team prepared interviewees with messaging in briefing books to help drive the narrative around Microsoft solutions, innovations and initiatives. Pop culture references were woven into the scripts that were built around the interviews.

The series achieved more than 12,000 downloads, far above the benchmark for podcast downloads.

Congratulations to Lisa Gibson, Veronica Langvee, Julia Perreira, Kate McKay and Amy Gingerich.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), headquartered in Washington, D.C., is the primary and largest source of financing for Latin America and the Caribbean, lending more than $11 billion dollars annually among its 48 member countries. Although the IDB is committed to equality, political and social realities held the organization back from addressing LGBTQ+ issues.

Recently, though, Latin America has become a leader in LGBTQ+ acceptance, so the time was right to tell the world where the IDB stood in the fight for inclusion and protection of everyone in the LGBTQ+ community. The problem was that the IDB’s platform, Improving Lives, had no material on the subject. The story the team found and how it executed it has earned the IDB the top prize in the “Article” category of PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards.

While scouring the archives, the team found a documentary commissioned in 2015 about how the IDB protects the traditions of indigenous communities. One of those communities was the Muxes, a group of people who for centuries have been recognized as a third gender by the Zapotecs of Mexico.

With only two weeks before the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, the team assembled a moving and eye-opening article about the Muxes, including photos and video extracted from the little-seen documentary. The article was produced in English and Spanish and deployed through social media, reaching more than 141,000 people on Facebook and engaging 15,000 of them.

Other social channels performed equally well. Most of those who clicked through to the story—about 15,000—finished reading it, an impressive feat for a first effort to communicate about this subject.

Congratulations to Martín Echenique, Gabriel García, Richard Solash, Oscar Hernández, Paula Corzo and Anabell Iglesias.

Clarity, an integrated marketing agency, had been working for Entrupy since the company’s launch. Entrupy is a software-as-a-service company that employs a variety of techniques to bring trust to transactions of high-value physical goods, authenticating luxury products from brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel.

Clarity had already obtained coverage for Entrupy; the agency was now ready to position Entrupy as a go-to resource for information on the market for counterfeit products. The report Clarity developed to achieve this goal has earned the agency first place in the “Brand Awareness” category of PR Daily’s Content Marketing Awards.

Nobody had ever undertaken an effort like this, which meant Clarity had no model from which to work. The agency began by gathering two years’ worth of data and establishing categories for comparison in an effort to determine what comparisons might prove interesting.

The effort took two months followed by another three months spent writing a report—“State of the Fake”—which included insights and points of interest (such as the fact that Louis Vuitton is counterfeited more than any other brand). With a budget limited to the agency’s retainer, the production of the finished report was performed entirely on the online tool Canva.

The finished report was set for launch on World Anti-Counterfeiting Day, June 6, 2019. Embargoed pitching began before the report was finished, leading to media meetings with key A-list publications, including Reuters, Financial Times and Women’s Wear Daily.

The reach of the coverage that followed exceeded 16 million, and The Wall Street Journal interviewed Entrupy’s CEO for a future story. The coverage resulted in Entrupy doubling its website visits.

Congratulations to Sherry Smith, Lisa Kurtz and Chanel Sedeno.

Carrie Jones was certain there was a better way to serve clients after working in some of the world’s biggest PR firms. Starting as a lone entrepreneur working in her basement, Jones built JPA Health Communications into an agency that now has more than 50 employees in three offices in the U.S. and the U.K. and has achieved impressive results on behalf of its clients.

JPA’s approach and successes have earned the agency the designation of “Health Care Agency or In-House Team of the Year” in Ragan’s Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

In 2018 alone, JPA has engaged with nearly 100 advocacy groups, launched 22 disease education campaigns, supported media relations and events at 23 congresses and secured more than 8.2 billion media impressions. JPA has also innovated The Why? Project, an internal initiative that serves as JPA’s cultural foundation.

The Why? Project addresses both the individual motivations of employees and the holistic approach the agency takes to client work. JPA surveys each of its clients from the past year about reliability, budget, stewardship, client services, timeliness, quality, business relations, personnel and responsiveness. The 2018 survey returned a 9.23 overall satisfaction rating and a 9.75 rating specifically on satisfaction with JPA staff attitude, courtesy and professionalism.

The agency has also invested in research and analytics capabilities, launching an exclusive tool that helps understand and interpret how and with whom conversations happen across the health care landscape, combining news media, companies, influencers and organizations into a single map that displays how these interactions take place.

Congratulations to Carrie Jones, Michael O’Brien, Stephen Piotrowski, Diane Wass, Julien Jarreau and Ken Deutsch.

Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk is known best for its diabetes products. In the U.S. alone, nearly 30 million Americans have type 2 diabetes (T2D), but Novo Nordisk recognized that about half fail to achieve their treatment goals. The campaign it launched to address the situation has won Ragan’s Health Care PR and Marketing Awards’ “Campaign of the Year” honor.

The failures result from the overwhelming nature of treatment, which involves a lifetime of monitoring, food choices, exercise, assessments and (for many) medications. Patients are typically stressed, overwhelmed and in need of support. Research found they also feel misunderstood, trivialized and implicitly judged.

Market research identified the channels most frequently used by the target audience, finding they are heavy consumers of both TV and social media, especially Facebook. To reach them in both places, Novo Nordisk enlisted Anthony Anderson, the star of the hit TV series “Black-ish” and a T2D patient himself.

In addition to Anderson serving as a spokesperson sharing his real-life experiences and creating empathy with the audience, the company orchestrated a first-of-its-kind T2D diagnosis into the storyline of Anderson’s series. Dubbed “Get Real About Diabetes,” the campaign launched on World Diabetes Day, when interest and receptivity to information about diabetes is at its peak.

A sentiment analysis performed on one of the campaign’s content items found nearly a third of people who commented on the video acknowledged or committed to changing their behavior and taking control of their type 2 diabetes.

The social media results are impressive, including 9.9 million views of video content and 1.2 million unique engagements; the campaign also achieved a 40% open rate for its welcome email.

Congratulations to the Novo Nordisk team and the many agencies who assisted in the effort.

MagnaCare had undergone a series of structural changes that it wanted to display on its website and in its visual brand identity, so it undertook a campaign to reinvigorate the brand in order to keep pace with a planned rollout of new products and services. Meeting that challenge has earned MagnaCare first place in the “Website Launch or Relaunch” category of Ragan’s Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

The team behind the redesign recognized that the refreshed website was MagnaCare’s best way to demonstrate its commitment to its customers, which meant it also had to preserve a connection to the company’s history.

The process began with client surveys and focus groups to gather insights about the brand. The marketing team worked closely with other parts of the organization to understand how the site could better serve clients and showcase the company’s suite of offerings. Developing a brand architecture, the team focused on the brand promise of putting customers first, supported by the brand’s pillars (e.g., deep labor expertise).

The tone of voice for the new site would be warm, approachable and personal, yet professional. The visual strategy focused on the geographic region. The color palette retained the familiar MagnaCare blue but added new, vibrant, friendly colors. Website content was made more interactive and targeted to distinct groups (i.e., members, plan sponsors, TPAs, carriers and providers).

Metrics were established proactively, including reduced time to complete tasks, increased lead generation, increased website traffic and improved user perception of the organization. The results include a 99% increase in site visits, 227% increase in users and a 67% increase in page views; lead generation is on an upward trend, too.

Congratulations to the website redesign team of Kat Durko (Creative Director), Dina Jordan (Director of Customer Marketing), Shari Ingerman (Content Manager), Tisa Corona (Lead Generation Manager), Barbara Geoghegan (Graphic Designer), led by Rosemary Chowallur (VP of Marketing).

The Society of Neurointerventional Surgery, the group representing surgeons who deal with strokes, understood that current triage systems often cost stroke victims their lives despite the fact that everyone in the U.S. is less than an hour from a facility that can perform a specific, revolutionary stroke surgery that saves lives and limits disability.

The application of a new visually arresting design to draw attention to the society’s materials—executed by Vanguard Communications—has won first place in the “Visual Design” category of Ragan’s 2019 Health Care PR and Marketing Awards.

The society launched its Get Ahead of Stroke campaign three years ago, targeting state governments, EMS personnel and others to revise triage practices to more quickly diagnose patients and get them to the right facility as quickly as possible. The design was applied to the campaign website, which now features design-consistent infographics that are easily shared via social media channels and have been repurposed for conferences and meetings, and as table tent centerpieces.

The team also developed a “fan deck,” horizontal pages printed on heavy stock that fan out, making it easier for society members to explain the campaign goals to legislators and other stakeholders. A deck of playing cards was produced that features an app for emergency medical personnel that helps them establish whether a patient is having a stroke.

The playing cards were one of the most popular items at the EMS World meeting in October; the app was downloaded more than twice as often as it had been in the weeks following the conference. The other materials have also produced positive feedback.

Congratulations to Marie Williams Denslow, Kate Fink, Brenda K. Foster, LeAnne DeFrancesco, Allyson Singh and JoAnn Antoine.