On January 9, 2019, Shutterstock launched a new global ad campaign, "It's Not Stock, It's Shutterstock.” The word “stock” had developed a bad reputation over the years. It brings to mind cheesy, cheap-looking footage and images. But the word “stock” is in our name and our assets aren’t cheap-looking at all. Our campaign set out to change the world’s perception of Shutterstock by showcasing our enormous collection of high-quality assets.

Interestingly enough, there was no brief for our social film. We were still in the first two weeks of our campaign’s soft launch, intent on measuring its effectiveness. And we weren’t intending to go big just yet. This was a spur-of-the-moment newsjacking opportunity that we couldn’t pass up.

20 days after our campaign launch, competing documentaries on Hulu and Netflix reignited conversation about Fyre Festival. The festival’s creators blew their budget on a promo video with models, yachts, and swimming pigs, leaving the actual festival-goers eating cheese sandwiches in makeshift tents.

We knew the infamous shoot wasn’t even necessary, because you know where else you can find models, yachts, and swimming pigs? On Shutterstock.

We quickly hijacked the conversation, recreating the original promo in one day with just over $2,000 in stock footage, proving that even a low budget stock video can have a huge impact.

We kept the video short, told our story with supers, and gave it a personality that mocked the fraudulent festival in a way that tapped into the schadenfreude everyone seemed to experience when watching the documentaries.

Our target audience was defined as creators. Creators included those you’d expect—designers, video producers, and ad industry types looking for the perfect assets to wow their clients. But from our research, we knew creators in today’s day and age was much broader — more and more people are looking for great content and tools to help produce sharper communications. And these people don’t have the big budgets to get it done.

We knew we could reach these creators through our social media channels. And since the creative community is bombarded with content every day, we needed a video that would catch fire—or should we say catch fyre. And, just like our target, we didn’t have a big budget to do so.

So instead of talking about how our footage could be used to create amazing videos. We proved it. Using music and footage only from Shutterstock in our video.

Cultural moments like this are fleeting, so we got to work in a hurry. Within11 days of the release of the two documentaries – we wrote a script, pulled footage, and put it together. The footage alone cost only $2,062.

We launched our video across all Shutterstock owned social media channels on Tuesday, January 29th at 3:45 pm, sharing it with our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn followers.

Once our video was live and getting shared organically, the strategy was to make key media outlets aware of the content that we had created in order to reach our target audience of marketing and creative professionals and boost visibility and engagement.

As both of these efforts kicked in, and our video had taken on a life of its own across the web, we expanded the promotion with paid media and put some money behind it to hyper-target the creative audience.

After the first two weeks, our video had over 2 million views. And the week we released it on our owned social channels was also the week before the Super Bowl. When people were typically talking about what ads were running in the big game, instead they were talking about our video. It was even posted with the headline “Shutterstock Wins the Super Bowl” on Imgur, receiving 90,000+ views (even though it never ran during the big game…)

We also captured the attention of our creative target internationally with earned media coverage in 100+ pieces of press globally. From the Wall Street Journal and Adweek in the U.S to B9 Brazil, Campaign Asia, Campaign Turkey, DesignTaxi Singapore, Vanity Fair France, Conde Nast Traveller India and MMR Russia. The world took notice of our video and we were successfully changing people’s perception of Shutterstock.