Thankful Experiential Activation

Background

Thankful is a worldwide social project with the mission to help make every day and every experience count. It encourages people to share with friends and family the things - big and small - that they are Thankful for.

Leading up to the launch of its online platform at the end of April 2014, Thankful approached CUBED for help generating awareness of the project and increasing social media engagement and reach.

Idea

Along with a comprehensive program of social media activities, CUBED created an experiential marketing activity to inspire and engage attendees at the family-friendly Riverboats Music Festival and the yoga festival Wanderlust in Melbourne and Sydney.

For the 'Thankful Tree' experiential marketing activity, CUBED set up a 2.8-meter tall LED light cherry blossom tree at each of the festivals. During the events, CUBED and Thankful staff members encouraged festival-goers to write what they were thankful for on branded tags and hang them on the tree.

CUBED and Thankful staff members also roamed the festivals with blackboards and chalk, getting attendees to write what they were Thankful for and taking photos of attendees holding their 'Thankfuls'.

These photos and the hundreds taken of the festival-goers, their Thankfuls, and the tree itself were uploaded to the Project Thankful Facebook page and Instagram account. People who had their photo taken by staff were encouraged to visit the page to tag themselves in the photos and share them across their networks.

Results

When CUBED developed an experiential marketing campaign to help Thankful spread its positive message on social media, the results were beyond expectations!

This experiential marketing activity was hugely successful by several measures.

The Thankful Tree was extremely popular at the festivals, becoming so laden with tags that CUBED staff had to clear it daily to make room for more. Over 1,800 Thankfuls were written and hung on the tree during the 3-day Riverboats festival – an average of more than 560 per day, 36% of event attendees.

Additionally, the activity achieved its objective of increasing social media engagement and reach for Thankful. Directly following the Riverboats event, the Project Thankful Facebook page saw an immediate and massive increase in reach and engagement:

• Weekly viral reach (number of people interacting with the page) increased sixfold, from 2,924 to 17,834 users
• Daily reach shot up to 8,105 users (an increase of more than 1,100%)
• Photo tags increased to 1,723

The Wanderlust in the City day festivals achieved a huge amount of interest and excitement with a total of 2,400 Thankfuls at Sydney and 1,900 at the Melbourne event, which totalled 41% of attendees for both the events.

The festival activity increased the Thankful Facebook Page Likes by 48% and the Thankful Instagram followers doubled in numbers.

Our PR activity allowed us to spread the word of Thankful even further by reaching out to key influencers fan bases.

• Riverboats shared The Thankful Tree photo album to their Facebook audience of 7,950.
• Leading Australian Nutritionist Lola Berry tweeted about Thankful to an audience of 7,700.
• Lululemon posted a blog entry about The Thankful Tree, which achieved over 150 unique views.