Branded entertainment in the USA is within the regulatory jurisdiction of the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Each of these agencies examines branded entertainment through a unique prism and with different aims and goals. Additionally, this area is subject to the self-regulatory guidelines of entities in the USA, like the National Advertising Review Council (NARC), the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU), both units of the Better Business Bureau, and the US broadcast networks. The FCC asserts its jurisdiction over branded entertainment two ways. First, Section 317 of the Communications Act of 1934, requiring broadcasters to disclose to their listeners or viewers if any content of the broadcast has been made in exchange for money, services or other valuable consideration. The disclosure must be made at the time the subject matter is broadcast. Additionally, the FCC adopted the sponsorship identification rule, which established the responsibilities of the broadcaster in making the sponsorship identification. Second is the law governing product placement in Section 507 of the Communication Arts Act of 1934, requiring a disclosure to be made in advance of a person providing or promising to provide money, services or other consideration to someone to include programme material in broadcast.

The campaign enjoyed amazing reach as a result of the data that informed our strategy and tactics to engage students.

As of 4/10/15, the campaign resulted in:

• 2.25 billion impressions on digital and traditional channels—14x our goal

• 74 million engagements including video views—9x our goal

• Click through rates from social media to product properties was greater than 100X our target benchmarks.

• Traditional media coverage from over 100 outlets including: The Guardian, Time, ABCNews.com, Mashable, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Today Show, Engadget, Adweek, Daily News, CBCNews.ca, USA Today, ETonline.com, WGN-TV, The Huffington Post, Inside Edition, MTV Online, PerezHilton.com, VH1 Online, Gizmodo, Yahoo! Finance, Times of India, London Evening Standard, E! Online, TechCrunch, and The Independent.

Additionally, engagement rates were far beyond our expectations. The target audience interacted with brand content at a 30-40% rate on Twitter, compared to our 1-2% target. Tumblr visitors, the strategic hub of our campaign, were 100 times more likely to visit product properties compared the non-Tumblr channel benchmarks. In addition, our campaign created a shift in positive sentiment for OneNote overall, moving from 27% to 31% positive in only three weeks.

And finally, one of the most telling points that illustrate how our target audience responded to the campaign was the amount of earned impressions and engagements it garnered compared to the paid media activities. An amazing 90% of the impressions and engagements were earned—i.e., they happened simply because our audience responded so strongly to the content.

A typical campaign to raise engagement and awareness for a productivity product employs above-the-line techniques such as banner ads. But data about our target millennial audience showed that a more sophisticated approach would be required for success. We learned that students were 59% more likely to consume Tumblr pages compared to the average site. We also saw that Tumblr mobile usage vs. desktop was higher than any other social media channel—a requirement for the long-form story-doing approach our campaign entailed. These data-points were integral to our decision to make Tumblr the hub of our campaign. This represents a fundamental shift in creative approach, and had a dramatic and continuous impact on creative expression, allowing our content to have more depth, vividness, and an approachable tone that would resonate with the student target.