Gen Z has demonstrated that they aren’t willing to sit on the sidelines and just hope for a better world. They are ready to hop into the driver's seat and shape their futures. At the same time, college students around the country were dealing with the repercussions of COVID-19. From school to potential careers, they were feeling stuck during a time of their lives when they wanted to be out there, creating change.

For Adobe, we needed to inspire college students to tap into their creativity and express themselves, despite the world around them coming to a halt.

The goal of the campaign was to create a platform big enough for the diverse and inspiring voices of this generation, and in doing so inspire others to create with Adobe.

Adobe’s mission is to reach and uplift Gen Z, the next generation of creators. To do that, we strategically sought out a partnership with BuzzFeed, one of the biggest and most popular sites among Gen Zers. We orchestrated a surround-sound experience by taking over BuzzFeed’s homepage with Gen Z-created content and then amplified that content with paid media across the site. To extend our reach, we pushed content out from Adobe and BuzzFeed’s TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook accounts, using paid media & targeting to ensure that we were reaching the right audience in the places they frequent most often.

The headline and creative crux of this campaign was a summer-long internship, preparing students for a three-day editorial & advertising takeover of the BuzzFeed homepage, which had never been done before. The takeover was strategically planned to coincide with one of Adobe’s critical sales periods, the back-to-school season.

To get people excited, we used paid & organic social media to introduce them to our Gen Z ambassadors, giving them a behind-the-scenes look at content creation.

During the takeover, we leveraged Adobe & BuzzFeed’s owned social channels, pushing out pieces of content as a way to drive people to the homepage. We also ramped up paid media across BuzzFeed’s sites, driving people to the takeover from wherever they were on-site.

After the takeover, we continued to push out content that centered on the Gen Z ambassadors’ experiences, driving people to a dedicated microsite that still houses all of the Gen Z-created.

For Adobe, more than any numerical outcome, the victory of this campaign was that we turned something that could have been a straightforward media buy into a chance for young people to expand their creative skills, be heard on a major stage and inspire many others to create. But, in the end, we were able to generate significant results that supported our campaign objectives.

First, we turned a media buy into a content generating machine with over 55 pieces of original content that generated 1.7 mm unique visitors and 34 million views. Finally, this content worked to drive interest in the brand as well with a .51% click-through rate, beating benchmark by 1.8x and a 16% increase in consideration among those exposed to the campaign.