Most branded content ends up leaning too heavily on the “branded” part of the content. Which is a turnoff for most audiences. We decided to minimize the branding of American Greetings as much as possible. The campaign ran online, globally.

To bring this to life, we created five documentary online films that showed people making their own ThankList and then acting upon it. From there, viewers were directed to our ThankList.com microsite to create their own written ThankList. They could also make a unique, personalized film that they could then share on Facebook or any of their social channels. Finally, we asked people to simply share their ThankList on Twitter or visually on Instagram using the hashtag #thanklist.

The ThankList videos served their purpose by not only racking up millions of views but, more importantly, driving viewers to the ThankList.com microsite so they could create their own lists. The easy-to-remember hashtag (#thanklist) also helped drive awareness in the press and in social activity. In the end, the campaign had almost 200 million PR impressions and a trending hashtag, and a new behavior had begun to emerge. Hopefully, by adding a little more gratitude to the world, our perception of where things are heading might change for the better.