2014 Platinum PR Awards: Wow! Award
Co-Winner: American Greetings - World's Toughest Job
With Mother's Day right around the corner, American Greetings needed a fresh way to make its audience not just think about but truly appreciate their mothers. Even though moms have the toughest job in the world, we don't really treat it like a real job. But what if we did? What if we came up with a way to show the world all the things moms do by creating a fake job?
To prove that moms have the world's toughest jobs, American Greetings created a real job posting for a fake company, Rethom Inc. ("Mother" spelled backwards), based on everything moms do under the title "Director of Operations" and placed it across 27 markets through online job postings, newspaper classified ads and Google sponsored ad units, resulting in 2,548,000 impressions. The job description outlined all of the tasks of a mother without revealing the job was indeed a mom.
As part of this social experiment, American Greetings also enlisted 12 people to evaluate and provide real-time feedback and testimonials on camera about the job posting. Every one of them thought the requirements were too tough for any one person and could not fathom that the job was unpaid. Those testimonials were combined into a "World's Toughest Job" video that was then sent as part of a PR teaser campaign to give the press a first look and enable them to push the content on our behalf. The video caught fire, with the first three placements across Adweek, Huffington Post Parents and the Today Show.
American Greetings turned to social media for some help as well, inviting online users to tweet/post any and all additional "requirements" they had missed. They also surveyed 500+ moms to create factual 'Mom-O-Graphics' that were shared socially
The campaign resulted in over 32 million broadcast TV placement impressions, nearly 2 million online and print impressions, and more than 308 million social media impressions. To date, the World's Toughest Job video has over 20 million views on YouTube.
Co-Winner: Nicolas' Garden and Drisha Leggitt & Company Communications - Nicolas' Garden Mobile App & Digital Platform
Eight-year-old "picky eater" Nicolas Come convinced his parents and volunteer programmers at a "Hackathon" to help him create a mobile app allowing children to share healthy recipes. The result was a simple mobile app known as "Nicolas' Garden." To promote himself as a "Kid Healthy Food Advocate" and his app, in April 2013 Nicolas recruited volunteer PR professional Drisha Leggitt, securing her volunteer services with a $1 retainer.
Leggitt conducted research through community outreach and personal networks, Nicolas' parents and school, and Sacramento's "Hacker Lab." Through media releases, fact sheets and advisories, extensive social media (including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.), and direct media "pitches" via traditional mail and email, Leggitt and Nicolas started sharing the word about the project.
To better encourage Nicolas' potential national appeal, Nicolas submitted a recipe in First Lady Obama's Healthy Lunch Recipe Contest. When it became apparent that Nicolas would not be his State's winner in the First Lady's contest, Leggitt convinced Clear Channel Entertainment to grant Nicolas news media credentials to "cover" the dinner as a "Healthy Kid Reporter."
Leggitt secured traditional and social media coverage from all Sacramento area media, and within 2 days secured CNN and Fox News Network wire service coverage. Nicolas also appeared live on "Fox & Friends," and received coverage in Nikkei Journal, Addesso and Brain Magazines, Scholastic Parent & Child Magazine and other media on 5 continents.
Nicolas' Garden is now the "Entrepreneur's Academy" and is a registered company with corporate partners (including Kaiser Permanente, Growums, National Geographic Kids Magazine, among others) and has raised $65,000 seed funding.
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NBC Entertainment – The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon
NVIDIA - Tegra K1 Impossibly Advanced