Through their social networks, college students today directly involve themselves with brands and issues of concern. They demand more from brands and marketers than any other generation has previously, and expect to be engaged and communicated with in more direct and sincere ways. That’s why, in order to get the attention of millenials, brands must live their values, and do more than simply tell a story. In essence, students today expect story-doing from the brands they care about.

Our strategic approach was to demonstrate through story-doing how Microsoft Office’s OneNote helps students make great ideas real through community involvement.

But as the most media-savvy generation, millenials will tune out traditional media tactics. Appropriate to the Creative Data Enhancement category, the data we collected on millenials led to our approach of story-doing, thereby increasing the creatives relevance for this audience. We set out to provide content that adds value to their lives, and meets them where they are: in social. The data also lead us to using Tumblr as the hub for our campaign. Through social channels, we strove to connect with the student audience, raise awareness of OneNote and get students involved in the OneNote product.

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.

Partnering with Microsoft, we embarked on an entirely new approach to marketing productivity products. Sourcing data from far-reaching sources both inside and outside of the walls of Microsoft, we combed through thousands of pages of quantitative and qualitative reports on the student target. Combining quantitative understanding of their behavior (both on and offline) with a qualitative, almost ethnographic insight into their values and motivations, we created a clear, dynamic portrait of today’s college student. We integrated these different data types to allow our clients to truly grasp the imperative of making a fundamental change in the marketing approach for millenials. By doing so, we had all of the tools we needed to create a meaningful brand connection with our target audience.

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.

While we did plan for a “big moment” in the campaign, the huge impact of our Robert Downey Jr (RDJ) video even took us by surprise. A typical response to a viral social moment is to promote it until it is apparent that the moment has passed. But we were prepared to test a different approach; testing the impact of related content to see if we could carry that momentum into a deeper connection between the audience and our brand. We deliberately tested copy that referenced the popular Robert Downey Jr. video, but gave our audience more information about the campaign, student story, and even the product behind this great video. Through this testing of more campaign and product-focused content, we uncovered the fact that the RDJ audience interacted with our non-RDJ content. This finding shifted our entire strategy going forward. Instead of promoting RDJ we promoted our related stories (Albert) and umbrella content (Collective Project). To finally capitalize on this wave, we promoted Microsoft OneNote itself.