Due to the unexpected nature of natural disasters, a thoughtful pre-plan had to be ready to drive immediate awareness.

As mentioned earlier, with a great concern toward potentially appearing as opportunistic, we were very deliberate in timing our flight during the year and the amount of the planned weight – The Home Depot wanted to share the good that was being done without overstating the message. Specific to our channel approach, while our data showed linear presence contributed the most of any single channel in driving awareness, we’ve seen combining linear and digital drove the highest lift in awareness and brand perceptions.

Also, with a limited timeframe and budget, we relied more on shorter-form videos to increase awareness and brand perceptions while driving traffic to the Long Form documentary film.

Natural Disasters impact local communities directly, but we felt it important to tell this story on a national level and bring broad awareness to how The Home Depot associates rally to help those in need.

With that, our audience was everyone, but to create more focus, we chose Millennials, as this audience skews higher in social awareness and activism.

It was a balance of timing and timeliness. It was important that our client was not seen by the public or press as to be self-aggrandizing or leveraging disaster for their own retail success, but still soon enough that it was relevant. Thus, our media did not run during or immediately after Hurricane/Tornado season, instead running two months after “Hurricane Season.”

We did not want to continue the flight if another disaster was primed to occur. We put in place filters in channel selection and safety measures with partners in anticipation of natural disasters. This flexibility would allow us to pull/switch creative immediately to stave off potential concerns that we were using disaster for commercial gain.

We achieved incredible reach in a short period of time across partners YouTube, CBS Sports, Discovery, Roku, Yahoo! and DV360:

• 269MM Total Impressions

• 98.6MM Video Completions

• 15k documentary views on YouTube (3M “Skilled”: 3.4k views)

And more importantly, we made a positive impact on the brand:

• 7% unaided brand awareness (any mention)

• +4% "Is truthful & transparent in its communication"

• +4% "Is adapting to the needs of professionals today"

Communications efforts amplified brand engagement externally and internally:

External

• 61 earned media placements garnering 32MM impressions