Most people know of QuickBooks and TurboTax, but until last year, many may not have known the name of the company behind those popular financial help products.
With the release of its latest brand campaign, Intuit puts a stake in the ground as the go-to ecosystem of financial products – QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint – with an animated tale of an entrepreneur who uses those products to get her business and her financial life in order.
The 60-second spot, ‘A Prosperity Story,’ a girl named Luisa sits in her father’s coffee shop, designing a hat and coffee cups. When a customer gives her a tip, a new entrepreneur is made. She is seen selling the design on clothes at a street stand, where she loses receipts to the wind. Knowing she needs a better way, she is visited by the Intuit giant – a character introduced in last year’s campaign during a four minute film. The giant shows her positive cash flow through QuickBooks, financial health and tax cuts with TurboTax and financial management with Mint. She finds a storefront and is on her way to her version of prosperity.
Intuit states that it fundamentally believes that everyone deserves, but many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, where even the smallest emergency can send a family into financial crisis. Half of all small businesses fail, according to the company.
“Everyone deserves a prosperous life, but the path to prosperity not easy for everyone,” Lauren Stafford-Webb, head of global corporate marketing for Intuit told The Drum. “We’re committed to turning those realities around. Intuit provides the financial tools so people can take control of their financial realities.
“The giant is a metaphor showing the power of our products,” she continued, stating that those products are powered by the company’s continuous data and advanced technology. “We’re working on behalf of our customers, giving them the confidence they need.”
The reason that Intuit chose an entrepreneur for its tale is that it brings it to a personal level. Stafford-Webb said that all people have some level of challenging financial problems, and that there are 750 million people around world who work for themselves in some way. They all need to manage their finances while following their passions. The commercial animation demonstrates how Intuit can use its suite of products to work on their behalf.
The campaign was created and produced by Intuit’s agency of record, Phenomenon and the film was directed by Against All Odds of Oscar-winning production company Passion Animation Studios.
To get to the story the team worked with, Intuit spent a lot of time with its customers, researching all over the country to find out how people dealt with their financial lives. “The truth (we found) is that people have passions in their lives and are working super hard to achieve prosperity for them. They’re going out on their own, managing their finances. That was really inspirational to us,” said Stafford-Webb.
She added that the first animated campaign exceeded expectations, with 25 million views, and a view-through rate on YouTube that went past the average movie trailer. The name recognition for Intuit is still an ongoing process and one that doesn’t happen overnight.
“We are a 35-year-old company. For the first 33 years, we were building our product brands,” said Stafford-Webb, adding that with people seeing Intuit as the umbrella company, there is relevance. “Knowing the ecosystem of the products, they know they can work seamlessly across them with confidence…It’s only year two for the Intuit brand. We do have a journey ahead of building equity in the brand.”
Intuit also had a 30-second ad, ‘Power of Giants’, in the AFC and NFC championship games, and it plans to unveil 60-second ‘A Prosperity Story’ during the Grammys. The media buy will then cover other big events, plus integrated television, online and social elements.
On social media, Intuit is inviting its customers to tell the company what prosperity means to them. Luisa was decided on as a character after the company talked with numerous self-employed artists. For many of those people, said Stafford-Webb, it was getting to live the life they want, and the company decided to champion that dedication, while providing the tools for people to live that life.
Scoring the film is a newly debuted song by Raiche, an up-and-coming Latina singer-songwriter who identifies with the spot’s protagonist, Luisa, from her own self-determination to achieve her goals as a musical artist. The song in the spot is called Shine, and Stafford-Webb said the walking beat helped create the drive behind Luisa.
Fruit of the Loom’s two-track back-to-school effort is turning parents’ social media oversharing into home décor.
Created by CP+B, “Pillows for Posterity” takes those amusing, quirky, hard-to-believe-my-kid-said-that sayings and transforms them into hand-stitched pillows. When mom is missing Lily when she’s back in school, a quick gaze at a pillow that reads “You ruined my life” will curb the separation pangs.
Using the #thingsmykidssay tag, parents can share their kids’ most memorable saying with family, friends and now, the world. A Facebook video encourages parents to share musings in the comments section by Aug. 29. Artisans will stitch winning quotes—some of which could already be contenders—into classy house pillows.
The second part of the back-to-school campaign, “Tales from Teacher,” turns actual teachers’ notes sent home with kids into three adorable animations including a squiggly worm friend that may have found its way into a girl’s pocket, an errant nacho to the eye and a warning about strawberry-flavored lip balm that was eaten.
Two years ago, Instagram did something that felt a little desperate: It copied the best product from a direct competitor, and even gave it the same name. Snapchat Stories were suddenly Instagram Stories.
It was a bold move. Silicon Valley is full of copycats, and Facebook, which owns Instagram, is one of the most shameless. But this felt particularly blatant.
Copying Snapchat wasn’t just about kneecapping Snapchat, still seen by many as Facebook’s greatest threat — and one that had rejected its overtures, even with billions of dollars attached to them.
It was also public acknowledgment that Instagram had a problem: The glamorous photos and videos that the app had become known for were now too glamourous. The bar for what was “Instagram-worthy” was so high that its users were starting to get intimidated. People don’t climb mountains, eat at fancy restaurants or take beautiful beach vacation photos every day. That meant people weren’t posting to Instagram every day, either.
“The biggest problem [people had] with Instagram is feeling the pressure of sharing really amazing photos,” CEO Kevin Systrom told Recode last summer. “People want to actually share a lot more, but they don’t want it to hang on the gallery wall.”
Stories, which disappear after 24 hours and are easily shot and decorated right in the Instagram app, represented a low-pressure alternative to Instagram’s high-pressure photo feed.
Two years later, it’s clear that launching Stories was the best decision Instagram ever made — and more broadly, one of the best things to come out of Facebook.
Stories didn’t save Instagram — it didn’t need saving — but there’s no doubt it super-charged it. Instagram Stories has attracted more than 400 million daily users and changed the way people share and consume things online.
And it seems to have taken real momentum away from Snapchat, which saw its user growth rate slow soon after Instagram Stories launched. Yesterday, Snap announced it lost three million users last quarter — its first decline ever.
There isn’t just one reason why Instagram Stories worked. There are a lot of them.
Perhaps the most important is that Stories alleviated some of the pressure that users felt when posting to their Instagram account.
Stories are supposed to be spontaneous, realistic and fun — a simple slice of real life, or a daily video journal. Most Stories content is shot casually and quickly through the Instagram app’s camera. And because viewers control…Continue reading
When it comes to growing your organic visibility and position, your company as an industry, or topic thought, quality content is a must. While blogging and page optimization is very beneficial, there is one popular strategy, when executed correctly, that can take your game to a whole new level. They are called “Pillar Pages.”
The idea of a pillar page, or what I’ve always called a core page, is to increase your topic authority by creating an in-depth piece of content that covers as many aspects of that specific topic as possible. Brian Dean has been using the strategy with great success for years. To see an example of one of his pages click here.
As you see on this page, there is a ton of content, broken into multiple sections (chapters). But the idea is to give as much information as you can around a topic to show your authority to your users and the search engines.
Pieces of content like this don’t just happen. They take a lot of time and careful planning and execution. Check out the video below to learn more.
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Over the last couple of years, or maybe a year and a half or so, HubSpot has been pushing something known as pillar page. HubSpot is an inbound marketing software used to get everything that you need to do to achieve high-level inbound marketing under one roof. Now, they’ve been pushing pillar pages for one main reason. Google is focused on topic authority. This is nothing new. This is something that we’ve known about for quite some time. They’ve been really gearing towards this in order to better understand user intent and to deliver the content that a user is expecting, that’s actually going to answer their questions.
What’s the difference between topics and keyword?
Topics you can think of as the meta-category. The top category. The big thought. We can have a topic like SEO. Let’s say we have this topic. Now, this is our big idea. This is something that we want to be known for, something that we want to do. Underneath this, we are going to have things like local SEO, or things like search marketing. We’re going to have things like Google. These are all keywords and terms that are now related to this meta topic, this main topic.
In Google, when they’re looking for authority figures on ideas, they want to know that you’re a topic expert. Yes, you want to be a niche expert as well and maybe this is going to be your focus over here. Then, there’s going to be subcategories under there. What they’re looking for, is do you know what you’re talking about. One of the ways that they do that, is they look at the content. They look to see whether or not that your keywords and the content that you’re writing about matches the topic authority of what you’re talking about.
Where does a pillar page fit into all of this?
Since Hummingbird was released and Google began to focus more on topics and more on relational search or search that’s more contextual, we have been focusing our SEO strategies on our services pages, on what we would call our core page, which is the exact same thing as a pillar page. These are pages that prove your topic authority and help the user better understand. A pillar page is not really a high-level piece of content. It’s more in that consideration, more in that middle of the buyer’s page. It’s going to add a lot more context. It’s also going to help that user take the next step into building that relationship with you.
What you want to do is have these pages on your site that display topic authority and then you want to build relationships between those pages and other related pieces of content. Again, let’s take a look at how this strategy works.
If you’ve got a website, you’ve got a number of pages. Right? You’ve got your home page, about, services, and content. Underneath your services pages, you’re going to have probably what you’re known for. I’m just going to use what we do as an example because it’s going to be easier for me and I hope it still makes sense to you. We’ve got SEO, we’ve got inbound, and we’ll also say analytics.
Now, we can treat either our services pages as core pages, or we can build a separate pillar page. What a pillar page would be, would be something like you’ve probably seen like the Ultimate Guide to SEO. What this guide is going to be is a really in-depth piece of content that covers everything about SEO from on page, off page, maybe some backlinks, maybe we’ll talk about the technical side, maybe we’ll talk about schema, maybe we’ll talk about local, Google, ranking factors. We’re really going to just create this really comprehensive piece of content that’s going to be this guide that lets our users know everything that they need to know about SEO. In that, we’re going to have these different sections that really show our authority. Each under these sections is going to have very targeted terms in them, like on page SEO, link building, Google algorithm, Google analytics, local SEO, ranking factor. All these other terms that are related to SEO, which we’ll want this page to rank for, is terms related to what is SEO. How does SEO work? You know, a guide to SEO. Those are the things we want searchers to find us for. So, we start creating all this content.
It doesn’t just stop there. We don’t just create this one page. Now, we’ve got to take this page and build relationships between our site, because we’re going to be doing this with each one of our core pages here. Then, Google now wants to see relationship. Just because you have this big giant piece of content and some links in it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to rank. I think that’s a lot of disconnection sometimes. We assume that, hey, as long as I build a lot of content, people are going to naturally rank to it, put links to it, and they’re going to like it. If you don’t put the work behind your content, and you don’t build the right linking, internally linking structure as well as building backlinks, you’re not going to get the visibility you want, which is why a lot of people get frustrated with pillar page campaigns or any other link building and content marketing campaigns. It is because they haven’t taken the extra effort to make sure one; they’ve added the context within their website and two; they’ve gotten outside sites to link to them as well.
Let’s talk a little bit about how that all flows together. So, you’ve created this pillar page and you’ve created this really in-depth piece of content that you want to ultimately drive your users to. A pillar page’s goal isn’t to move people to a blog, it’s to move people deeper into that page and hopefully take some action. This can be your pillar page.
Now, what you want to do is start driving traffic or start to show relationships to it. Again, let’s say this one is about SEO again. Now, I might have a blog article that is an SEO how to. I want to add an internal link from this SEO how to into the pillar page. Maybe I’ve got one on local SEO. Again, I want to add an internal link to that. I also maybe have one on backlinks. I want to add an internal link back to that. What this is doing is starting to create a web. Go figure, right? Where Google is able to crawl our sites and begin to see the relationship. Not just the content on this page, but that we also have other authoritative pieces of content on our website. Now, what we also need to do is take these pages and, if appropriate, interlink them where it makes sense. Again, we’re showing that relationship. We also want to find high-quality third-party sites that we can build relationships with that can also build backlinks to these pages. That’s HQ for high-quality.
That is going to raise the visibility of these blog pages. The authority of these blog pages, which then is going to pass that authority to the pillar page as well. Alone, this pillar page should be attracting tons of links as well. If it is a really good piece of content and it’s being marketed well and distributed well, it’s going to increase in value which in return has the potential to increase the value of all your other content.
This really starts to work in a very cyclical way and it needs to all be integrated to each other. You can’t just put one page up and spend a lot of time creating this content and hope that people are going to find it and link to it. You may have people on social. Great. Push it out to social. Use it in your newsletter, but make sure you’re doing the other things. Make sure that the technical side of it is done right, that the content is well written, that it’s easy to read, that it’s digestible, that it’s contextual, and then make sure that you have the links in place.
This is a critical piece of this strategy to make it work. A lot of people don’t do it because it’s hard and it does take time. It takes a lot of organization and understanding what are these types of sites that you should be linking to. Not all links are created equal. You can spend a lot of time and a lot of money buying or going after bad links that are actually going to do the opposite of what you want the strategy to do for you. Make sure that you take the time to not just identify what you want to create that core pillar page about, but what are the other assets you have that you can interlink and begin to build this web. What resources can you build outside of that? Maybe you can do some guest posting, get some resource pages, maybe you find some high-quality niche communities in LinkedIn, or some other places, where you can begin to build in some of these links and these other assets and traffic that are going to build the…
The Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) recently launched two campaigns that take vastly different approaches to target different audiences, yet have the same ultimate goal: to attract more visitors from the U.S. and other inbound markets.
At an event in New York this week, JNTO president Ryoichi Matsuyama discussed Enjoy My Japan, a global campaign that aims to lure potential visitors by appealing to seven “passion points”: cuisine, traditional experiences and attractions, nature, art, relaxation, city exploration and outdoor activities. Those passion points are highlighted in a series of video clips.
Whereas past tourism efforts focused on visitor volume, Matsuyama said, the Enjoy My Japan campaign aims for a “quality-oriented” approach that appeals to visitors’ interests and encourages longer stays and increased spending.
While U.S. visitors are familiar with Japan’s major cities and traditional experiences, Matsuyama said, the JNTO also hopes to highlight lesser-known attractions such as Japan’s national parks and beaches — particularly as the country prepares to host next year’s Rugby World Cup and the 2020 Summer Olympics.
On the other hand, the JNTO’s other new campaign, Come to Japan, seeks to capitalize on an established commodity, anime, to lure millennial visitors from the U.S.
That campaign, part of an overall “Cool Japan” promotional strategy, features YouTube character Kizuna AI as its ambassador across various social media platforms. The Kizuna AI Come to Japan Sweepstakes, with a grand prize of roundtrip airfare for two to Tokyo, concludes March 25.
“In the United States, digital marketing is an effective way to engage potential travelers, particularly millennials,” Ken Iwata, JNTO New York executive director, said in a statement. “Anime has attracted more than 20 million users to American video streaming platforms like Crunchyroll, so we believe it can help us reach a broad audience in a new and exciting way.”
Japan received an estimated 28.7 million visitors last year, with the U.S. and Europe comprising about 11% of that total. The country hopes to reach 40 million visitors by 2020.
About five years ago, Kate Spade found itself facing many of the same issues as other fashion brands. With glossy two-page magazine ads continuing to lose their luster, the handbag maker was struggling to shed its more traditional, print-oriented ways and create a digital strategy that worked.
Speaking at SXSW, Kate Spade’s chief marketing officer Mary Beech explained that at the time, the brand was employing a hollow one-size-fits-all approach to social by posting the same content on each platform. Additionally, the company was struggling to glean any real insights from the data it had on hand.
“We created content for all of the various mediums in which we were on, but we created one piece of content and just pushed it across all the mediums, not taking into any account what was specific about those distribution techniques,” said Beech. “We had lots of data, but we didn’t have insights, and so we weren’t using those insights to leverage them against the content we created and deployed.”
Fast forward to 2018, and the brand – which was acquired by Coach last year for $2.4bn – is doing things a bit differently. Through creating content that’s both platform-specific and entertainment-driven, the New York-based company has managed to create a digital strategy that it says is helping it connect and engage with fans.
Finding a story to tell
Getting into a “video-first” mindset is something that Kristen Naiman, senior vice president of brand creative at Kate Spade’s in-house agency, wanted to prioritize when she joined the company four years ago. At the time, Naiman said her team was “very stuck in thinking about the photograph” as the main form of communication.
To move away from that, her team began looking at what sorts of shows and series were popular to see if the brand could take any cues from the entertainment world.
“A lot of what was happening out there that felt really exciting was this renaissance of serialized narrative storytelling content,” she said, pointing to shows like HBO’s High Maintenance and the rising popularly of Netflix. It was around that same time that female comedians like Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer were beginning to see their careers skyrocket, something she said the brand also took note of since she believed they were helping to usher in a new era of comedy.
“We thought both of those things were amazing and really interesting,” said Naiman.
Those two insights led to the birth of Kate Spade’s #MissAdventure, a short-form YouTube show starring actress and singer Anna Kendrick that kicked off in 2014. In the series, Kendrick plays a slightly ditzy, quirky woman who spends her days exploring New York.
“Our principles were twofold: we were going to make something that behaved in a way that was digital-first, and we were going to make something that while it was meant to be a piece of marketing to a certain degree, was interesting first,” said Naiman.
Kate Spade’s products were tied into the series via a concept Naiman calls “product as character,” which essentially involves making a product an integral part of the story rather than something a character is simply wearing or using.
For instance, in an episode of #MissAdventure called ‘The Waiting Game,’ Kendrick realizes she’s lost her apartment keys once she arrives at her doorstep. To get in, she decides to create a makeshift rope using the Kate Spade clothes and shoes she’s just bought so she can climb in via the fire escape.
Naiman said making the brand’s products a “distinct element” in the stories it tells helps the brand become part of the narrative, a strategy she believes is more effective than simply sticking a logo at the end of a video.
“We are a materialist culture. We all live with a lot of stuff in our lives, and those elements in our lives are part of our story,” she said.
Choosing a platform
While some brands strive to be early adopters and try out every new platform, Kate Spade has taken a more cautious approach to social.
Krista Neuhaus, Kate Spade’s senior director of digital brand marketing, said the brand was on every single social channel when she joined a few years back. Upon joining, she made it her job to figure out not only which channels the brand should be on and which ones it shouldn’t, but also how it should approach each individual platform…Read more
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