Case Study: Hammermill® Social Video Campaign

Promoting Paper with Pixels

OVERVIEW

How a video campaign made paper more relevant to digital natives

WHAT WE DID

  • Competitive Audit
  • Social Media
  • Digital Content Strategy
  • Video Production
Among digital natives, the relevancy of paper is in question. So when it comes to attracting a younger audience, Hammermill® paper is waging an uphill battle. Ironically enough, we saw an opportunity to wage the battle successfully through Instagram, one of the most popular social platforms among Millennial and Gen Z audiences.
 
By delivering the kind of short-form entertainment this platform is known for, Simon/Myers believed that Hammermill® could maintain, and even increase, its relevance to the younger, digitally focused generation. And in a larger sense, we wanted to demonstrate that paper can play well in a pixel universe.

RESULTS

300%

typical engagement rate

+10.5%

instagram followers

59

average saves per post

A Star Is Born

We had been promoting the fact that Hammermill is Paper Made Right™ for a couple of years — made right for business, made right for the planet, and made right here in the U.S. But we hadn’t yet done so in a humorous way. This led our team to ask, “What if we created a character whose projects never quite come out right, despite using the right paper?” With that, our charmingly untalented artist was born.
 
Using in-house talent (our Director of Digital Marketing) we developed a handful of scenarios for an artist whose preferred canvas is Hammermill paper. She’s utterly blind to her lack of creative ability, and quite proud of the utter failures that result.

In-House Production Advantages

In addition to homegrown talent, we took advantage of our in-house studio, which was designed with just this type of short video production in mind. In fact, we had recently hired a multi-talented videographer/designer to head up our production department, and this was his first chance to play in his new playground.
 
Not only did our employees contribute all the props and equipment, but on production days, they made themselves available to lend a hand wherever one was needed. The result? An efficient, cost-effective, and highly controlled production environment that we can now replicate for any video project, for any client.

A High Measure of Success

Not only was this the most-liked video series on the Hammermill Instagram page to date, but from February through July of 2023 the series drove an eye-opening 10.5% increase in their followers. But perhaps even more impressive, the engagement rate for all four campaign videos (total number of engagements divided by total number of followers) was 3.1%. To put that in perspective, the overall median engagement rate on Instagram for 2023 is 0.47%, with 1.05% being considered good. 

Suffice it to say that numbers like these look good on paper and in pixels.
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