Mother’s Day in the U.S. is a holiday riddled with annual clichés and one-dimensional stereotypes. We were challenged to show consumers how to see mom in a different light.

Our insight was that even though moms have the toughest job in the world, we don’t really treat it like a real job. But what if we did?

The campaign was developed around a PR-led strategy to seed storytelling and leverage the power of third-party media influencers to reinforce credibility and share-power.

We created a fake job description based on everything moms do and place ads for it online and newspapers. We interviewed people over videoconference to get their honest reactions to the somewhat ridiculous (yet accurate) requirements, and captured results in a video that became our pinnacle asset used to drive campaign awareness and engagement. We mapped out a PR plan to release the video four weeks prior to Mother's Day so that American Greetings could start and become the leader in what we knew would be an evolving conversation around moms and the Mother's Day holiday. Through our initial story seeding efforts with top tier press, we drove over 733 million PR impressions in the first week. We continued to seed the video with additional media outlets while developing unique content to support an organic social swell, circling the world through Facebook shares, Twitter mentions, Instagram posts and even Tumblr pages, pushing final campaign impressions up over 1.8 billion in PR and social.

To create fodder for our video, we started by placing job ads online (Google AdWords and Craigslist) and in 14 U.S. newspapers. We conducted videoconference interviews and turned them into a YouTube video, which we leveraged in a tiered PR rollout beginning with key press in ad/marketing trades, and extending to national morning shows and mom/parenting outlets.

The two week standalone PR effort enabled the story to stick while driving an organic social swell, circling the world through Facebook shares, Twitter mentions, Instagram posts and Tumblr pages.

In addition we enlisted 35 influencers to extend storytelling amongst their social communities. Given successful influx of earned press, we were able to shift paid media dollars to support sustaining social engagements. Lastly, we secured a live interview with Mullen’s agency president and American Greetings CMO, both moms, to appear together on Fox & Friends on the Friday morning before Mother's Day.

Generated brand awareness with general market/target audience:

- 733 million+ PR/social impressions during launch week without paid media

- Total: 1.8 billion combined PR/social impressions

- Mentioned in 363+ outlets

Social conversation/engagement around American Greetings:

- 23+ million YouTube views and counting

- in

- Total tweets 80,849; Total Twitter Impressions 308,872,320

- 800+ Instagram posts

Positioning American Greetings as culturally relevant; an innovative leader:

- WSJ Viral Video of the week

- YouTube Re:View Top 5 Video (global)

- Adweek Top Commercial of the Week

- 2014 #1 Mother’s Day Campaign in terms of “true reach” by Visible Measures

Consumer conversion with Cardstore.com:

- Traffic +37%

- Orders +20%

- New customers +40%

- Net sales +16% YOY

- PTAT (People Talking About This) for the brand (not just video) up 495%