Among the many ways an organization can engage customers, few are more intimate than taking one for a car ride. For Microsoft, these rides are recorded using a dashboard camera and shared on YouTube in a video series that’s won first place in the “Customer Engagement” category of PR Daily’s 2018 Content Marketing Awards.

The series, which now numbers more than 100 videos, features chief information officers from companies like Anheuser-Busch, Estée Lauder, Moody’s, Fujitsu, Citrix and a host of others. Other drives have featured key Microsoft executives. All the videos are shared on the company’s YouTube channel and promoted through a host of social media sites.

These discussions earn a healthy number of views on YouTube alone: One featuring Dow Chemical’s Mauricio Guerra has been seen more than 1,200 times. The weekly pace of the series speaks to Microsoft’s commitment to engaging with customers. The notion of sharing the videos demonstrates a desire to make sure the information goes beyond the one-on-one chat.

Targeting IT executives, journalists and technology implementers, the series is designed to help IT decision-makers “better understand how their peers were using technology and how journalists/analysts were evaluating this tech,” according to Microsoft. “An equally important goal was to help the IT workforce see the way their leaders and influencers were talking about and approaching emerging technology.”

Since January 2017, the videos have been viewed more than 2 million times

To elevate its brand, the largest Catholic health system in the United States opted to focus on thought leadership, raising the profile of the organization’s key national and regional leaders. Its success has taken first place in the “Brand Awareness” category of PR Daily’s 2018 Content Marketing Awards.

The team of Nick Ragone and Johnny Smith settled on three means of showcasing the company’s leaders: media content, speaking engagements and submitting Ascension for important, visible recognition. The media effort focused on earned media, achieved in large part through op-eds the company offered addressing topics of interest to publications based on their niche and region. This element of the brand awareness effort led to more than 200 media placements in national health care and consumer publications, along with local media market outlets, shining a spotlight on 65 different company leaders.

The team also published LinkedIn posts from key leaders, attracting additional attention through the business-focused social network. Research delved into the best speaking and award opportunities, resulting in more than 100 national and regional speaking engagements and 75 national and local awards.

Ascension employed social media to tie the campaign together, producing some 500 posts reaching more than 8 million people. These campaign elements remained focused on topics already part of the national health care discussion, such as health care reform, telemedicine and access to care.

It’s a highly effective approach to building reputation based on thought leadership, involving leaders from across the organization.

Congratulations to Nick Ragone and Johnny Smith.

Businesses face it on a regular basis: The patent awarded a product expires, enabling competitors to flood the market with low-priced generic versions. That was what Ingredion faced when the patent for its NOVATION® starches in Europe, the Middle East and Africa neared expiration. Ingredion and its agency, Stein IAS, stepped up to the challenge, and in so doing have won first place in the “Content Marketing Strategy” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

NOVATION® is a portfolio of more than 25 “clean label” starches, a designation that proclaims the natural, additive-free food products consumers recognize (such as corn flour). In order to protect its share of market as competitors prepared to take advantage of the patent expiration, Ingredion and Stein IAS launched a comprehensive content marketing campaign based on a detailed competitor analysis, a focus on the future of food fashions and eating trends, and a thorough understanding of the audience segments the organization needed to reach (including chefs, food technologists, label and packaging creators, and ingredient buyers and negotiators). 

The campaign kicked off with two roundtable events featuring industry experts, leading to a downloadable report, “2020: The Future of Simple, Natural and Clean Label Food.” A brand proposition, “Quest for the Delicious Balance,” was applied to all of the campaign’s content. Its credibility was enhanced with the recruitment of Dr. Morgaine Gaye, a popular food futurologist who brought an independent voice to Ingredion’s message. 

The campaign itself included traditional PR as well as a sophisticated email campaign that included targeting IP addresses of recipients with online ads, along with the development of an online product selection tool. 

Ultimately, the campaign not only achieved widespread media coverage and admirable digital engagement levels, it also delivered a record number of leads that resulted in significant new business. 

Congratulations for a campaign skillfully managed and executed by Max Gordon, Paul Myerscough, Harriet Pearson and Victoria O’Toole.

Microsoft Story Labs epitomizes what a content-driven site can be. For that, it’s won first place in the “Website” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

Story Labs is all about long-form storytelling that doesn’t rub Microsoft in the reader’s face; rather, Microsoft’s technologies play a role in the stories but take a backseat to the stories themselves. 

Story Labs is a “boutique internal agency and creative SWAT team within the company’s communications/marketing division,” composed of journalists, designers, producers, animators, artists and photographers devoted to “finding the most interesting stories, people, and ideas from across the company and sharing them with the world through best-in-class storytelling.” 

Meandering through the site produces delightful surprises, such as an animated guide to blockchain, a look inside Microsoft’s Building 87 (which houses three futuristic hardware labs), a story on a Detroit wallpaper organization(which doesn’t mention Microsoft or any of its products, but shows one of the designers using a Microsoft computer in an image) and a visit with artist Hugh MacLeod (showcasing his illustrated guide to life at Microsoft). 

Anybody looking for a model content portal should check out this website.

Congratulations to Steve Wiens, Thomas Kohnstamm, Michael Wann and Doug Dawson. 

What does it mean to “go viral?” Simply put, it’s when content spreads rapidly because a lot of people share it, resulting in outsized awareness of the content. Hunter Public Relations was able to achieve that kind of sharing, leading to a first-place win in the “Viral and Trending Content Marketing” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

Through its monitoring, Hunter found that celebrity Chrissy Teigen took to Twitter to ask her 5 million-plus followers how to make an Outback Steakhouse Bloomin’ Onion at home. Outback was Hunter PR’s client; its work was aimed at earning national media coverage for the 29-year-old restaurant chain. 

Within 20 minutes, Hunter PR (with Outback’s support) had tweeted back, offering to teach Teigen Outback’s “special Bloomin’ Onion tricks.” Teigen replied, asking Outback to send a chef to her home. 

Among those who were interested in the exchange was People.com, which wanted to include Bloomin’ Onion prep tips in an article that went live the day after the chef provided Teigen with her lesson (also attended by Teigen’s husband, singer John Legend, and a few of the couple’s closest friends). 

Teigen, Legend and their guests shared the experience on multiple social networks, adding momentum to the People.com story. While this sounds like a setup, Hunter insists Teigen was never contracted as a paid spokesperson and that it confines its activities to responding to inquiries, not proactively pitching stories. 

The experience resulted in 71 placements across online, social, print and broadcast media channels for more than 340 million branded impressions. Among the press covering the story were US Weekly, InStyle, Entertainment Tonight, Reinfery29, Teen Vogue and more. Social media posts produced a 76 percent brand mention pull-through. 

Kudos to Hunter PR’s Mike Surabian, Alexandra Capotorto, Maya Cass and Megan Rhein for producing a viral sensation.

A combination of great content, compelling subject matter, animation, interviews, narration and some finger-pointing at organizations too dependent on overused clichés in their B2B marketing efforts has earned B2B marketing organization Stein IAS first place in the “Video” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

Each video in the series, which was published on the website of the popular media outlet The Drum, is longer than conventional wisdom would suggest they should be in a society supposedly afflicted with attention deficit disorder. Yet many viewers will watch every one of the 12 videos all the way through, eager to see what comes next.

The clichés were drawn from a Stein IAS book published in 2007 that covered 101 clichés. The videos focused on lightbulbs, cogs, handshakes, piggy banks, stopwatches, jigsaw puzzles and tape measures, among other things. Each featured on-screen commentary from representatives of heavyweight firms like Adobe and Google, as well as “The Web Psychologist” and others. 

The videos were launched at the Business Marketing Association of America conference in Chicago. Ultimately, the videos generated 18,500 views and have reached more than 29 million social media users. Stein IAS attracted more than 4,000 new website visitors thanks to the videos, along with 400 requests for the decade-old book. 

The videos also succeeded in attracting new business. You must watch these videos, if for no other reason than to avoid using the clichés they cover.

Congratulations to Reuben Webb, Tom Stein, Dave Croucher and Chris Place.

Cisco Systems’ “We are Cisco” social media accounts are filled with employee-generated content. The Talent Brand Team’s entire content strategy is based on employee-generated content, which helps the organization “display the Cisco Life authentically to external candidates.”  That’s made Cisco the winner in the “User-Generated Content” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

The Talent Brand Team’s mantra, “Be you, with us. #WeAreCisco,” is designed to show recruits who may have their sights set on a startup how working at Cisco Systems—a relatively old, global, successful networking organization—can provide the same experience. 

To generate content in 2017, the Talent Brand Team launched its second annual #WeAreCisco #LoveWhereYouWork contest to encourage employees to share why they believe the organization is a great place to work. (The contest supplements an ongoing employee takeover scheme for the organization’s Snapchat account.) Employees were encouraged to share a photo using the hashtags and conveying why they loved working at Cisco. 

The team promoted the contest in a variety of exciting ways, including extending it beyond its planned May 3 deadline to tap into the “May the 4th be with you” cultural event. The pre-May 4 contest produced 1,300 unique entries, “enough employee-generated content to fill our social content calendars a month at a time.” The May 4th campaign added significant numbers to the total. 

Congratulations to the team of Macy Andrews, Carmen Collins, Casie Shimansky, Tamar Glasner and Anjali Bhatia.

Marriott’s inspired social media effort following Nick Johnson’s (ultimately successful) attempt to become the first player to capture all of the 145 characters in the runaway mobile gaming hit, Pokémon Go, has won Marriott first place in the “Real-Time Content” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

Johnson had already captured all the Pokémon characters available in the United States, a fact that came to Marriott’s attention thanks to the social media monitoring of its M Live team. M Live saw the potential to tie Johnson’s quest to the hotel chain’s loyalty program, Marriott Rewards.

It cost Marriott only $3,325 to cover the costs of Johnson’s travel (including seven nights at Marriott properties on three continents). In exchange, hundreds of thousands of people followed his exploits as M Live shared them across Twitter and Snapchat. (In fact, it was M Live’s real-time monitoring of Pokémon Go exploits in various parts of its hotels that got them started on the campaign in the first place.) 

The coordinated effort to share Johnson’s exploits attracted media attention, resulting in more than 800 global news outlets covering the story, which produced 281 million total PR impressions (including 9 million impressions on Twitter alone). Most of the news coverage and much of the social media sharing noted Marriott Rewards’ involvement, producing massive ROI for a minimal investment.

Congratulations to Marriott International and the team of Matthew Glick, Nicole Galbraith, Adam Kravitz, Karin Timpone, Tony Chow, Vanessa Saw, Nathalie Lun, Cecilia Giraud, Bianca Kauffeld, Olivia Donnan, Osama Hirzalla, Sara Conneighton and John Wolf.

A visit by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to 3M Canada’s location in London, Ontario was confirmed only a week before it took place, providing the organization’s communicators only a 48-hour window in which to pull off a social media campaign. Their success has led to 3M Canada winning first place in the “Social Media” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

The campaign was designed to scale the live event to a national audience in real time, take advantage of the spotlight to showcase the 3M brand, and drive engagement so 3M Canada would trend on social media for the first time ever. The team, pulled together from multiple departments, developed a content plan based on key messages, using paid, earned, and owned media as venues for text, photos and videos. 

Audience targeting in paid media focused on policy makers, business decision makers, 3M employees and STEM students. The organic social media effort traversed Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, with content formatted for each channel to deliver the maximum impact. 

Twenty-four hours before the event, the team deployed promotional content mainly on Facebook with the hashtag #PMat3M, and invited participation in the live social media coverage. The team also handpicked and briefed 15 3M employees who had influential social media presences; they attended the event and shared the experience through their own channels. 

The effort achieved all of its goals, with engagement for paid content reaching 6.02 percent, four points above the organization’s engagement average. The top post achieved a rate of 27.02 percent. Most importantly, 3M Canada reached national trending status.

Congratulations for the speedy and successful work to Sonya Gilpin, Marina Brkljaca, Brittany Smith, Liisa Sheldrick and Michelle Weir.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) opened its academic doors just eight years ago, and with a significant investment to build a global research and education university from the ground-up, it attracted a top-flight international faculty and made an impression in the academic world in short order. Building upon a momentum of progress, the University decided to promote its interdisciplinary research culture by showcasing its people and their ideas through intelligent and consumable story-telling for audiences within Saudi Arabia and around the world. Its effort to change that has earned KAUST first place in the “Print Publications” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

To raise its profile, the university opted to produce a print magazine based on its new research-focused news website. The magazine’s goal was to promote the research emerging from KAUST in a consumer-friendly format. 

The university contracted with media organization Springer Nature, which brought its deep experience in publishing research to the table (Springer publishes Scientific American, among other titles). Initially conceived as an annual publication, feedback convinced KAUST to split KAUST Discovery Magazine into two smaller issues. 

The first three issues have earned considerable attention: Even Peter Wiley of Wiley Publishing sent an unsolicited note conveying his admiration for the magazine. The subscriber list grows exponentially with each issue; the third issue brought an impressive 40 percent growth in the subscriber base. The publication has also driven traffic to the Discovery website. 

Congratulations to the KAUST Discovery team for a print publication with gorgeous design and accessible writing.

Too many infographics are just narrative text with a few images. The same can’t be said for Aflac, though, which produced a series of five infographics to support the release of its annual WorkForces Report. The series has won Aflac first place in the “Infographics” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

The WorkForces Report is an analysis of surveys that examines the challenges, needs and trends faced by employers and employees related to finances and health care benefits. The infographics used images and charts to convey survey data in a way that made the information easier to digest without the need to digest long tracts of text. The numbers jump out and the images support them, with just a few words to add context and meaning for each data point. 

Despite the infographics’ visual appeal and useful information, they didn’t gain much traction when first released. The most popular infographic, released in March, was accessed only 12 times, while the most popular in the infographic for April was accessed 226 times. Success meant targeted promotion to the right audience.

In May, though, Aflac promoted the infographic on its website for agents, who could leverage it to open doors with businesses for sales; it was accessed more than 1,700 times. Continued promotion correlated with a jump in views of the infographics, with the highest-performing graphic in November getting 2,425. 

The most popular of the infographics, “5 Reasons to Say Yes to Voluntary Insurance,” wound up with a cumulative 15,341 views. As Aflac notes, “Overall (report) success would not have been possible without our high-performing infographics.” 

Congratulations to Angie Blackmar, Brande Carden, Casie Harbin, Bianka Huling and Ronda Templeton for an appealing and informative infographic series.

Marriott’s social media command center, M Live, discovered that players of the smartphone game Pokémon Go had brought their game play to Marriott properties. With gamers capturing the elusive Pokémon characters in Marriott guest rooms, pools, restaurants, conference spaces, and other public spaces, the M Live team identified an opportunity to build buzz for the brand’s loyalty program, Marriott Rewards, by breaking through the unprecedented amount of noise that had risen with the game’s popularity. Its success has earned Marriott first place in the “Influencer Marketing” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

It all centered on Nick Johnson’s quest to become the first gamer to catch all 145 Pokémon Go characters. He achieved the feat in the United States, but then sought to capture the remaining characters accessible only outside the U.S. 

M Live and Marriott Rewards engaged Johnson to travel the globe, knowing they would drive a high volume of social media engagement, reach and PR impressions along the way. Through Johnson’s travels, Marriott PR worked to spread the word with leading news agencies while gamers and observers followed the story on the full range of social channels. 

Ultimately the campaign scored coverage in 800+ global news outlets and achieved 281 million PR impressions and 9 million Twitter impressions—all for the cost of Nick’s travel, which amounted to $3,325. 

Congratulations to Matthew Glick, Nicole Galbraith, Adam Kravitz, Karin Timpone, Tony Chow, Vanessa Saw, Nathalie Lun, Cecilia Giraud, Bianca Kauffeld, Olivia Donnan, Osama Hirzalla, Sara Conneighton and John Wolf.

SHIFT Communications has had success with its email newsletter, SHIFT Happens, based on its original goal of reaching as many people as possible. Last year, though, SHIFT opted to shift its focus from quantity to quality. It success has earned SHIFT first place in the “Electronic Publication or E-Newsletter” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

Since its launch, SHIFT Happens has attracted nearly 40,000 readers. The newsletter was useful, well designed and entertaining. But was it attracting the right kinds of subscribers that would eventually lead to revenue? 

With a goal of adding quality names to the subscriber list, SHIFT set new objectives that started with increasing attributable revenue from SHIFT Happens by 20 percent year over year. Another goal: getting SHIFT Happens into the C-Suite. 

SHIFT is known (among other things) for its ability to manage data, a skill the agency applied to this effort by analyzing its existing subscriber list and appending email addresses with names, titles, and organizations. With that analysis under its belt, SHIFT focused on acquiring readers from known, high-quality sources. 

Reader acquisition campaigns ran throughout the year, employing techniques like geofencing at communication events, digital advertising via social media targeting conversations at those events and using social media content analytics to determine the most appropriate content. 

The results exceeded goals, increasing C-suite penetration 0.2 percent and senior executive ranks by 53.8 percent. Newsletter contact form completions rose 75 percent, and contact form conversions rose nearly 100 percent. Most important, direct and assisted conversion revenue attributed to the newsletter both rose more than 25 percent. 

For producing a newsletter that delivers meaningful results, congratulations to Christopher S. Penn, Katie Lioy, Tori Sabourin, Natalie Cullings, Angie Goldman and Casey Egan.

Light bulbs. Tape measures. Piggy banks. Handshakes. Targets. You have seen these images employed by marketers over and over again. What better way for a marketing agency to convey that its ideas are more original than by shining a light on what’s not—worn-out clichés like these? That’s what Stein IAS did, winning first place in the “Content Series” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

Stein IAS produced its video series and released it through its partnership with the publication The Drum. Each video features experts from the likes of Google and Adobe talking about what the featured cliché is supposed to convey and why it doesn’t work, along with examples from the real world of B2B marketing and advertising. 

The video series grew out of a book, “101 Clichés,” which the organization published in 2007. The 12 fast-paced videos are longer than conventional wisdom suggests is appropriate for the easily bored audience for web videos, but each one compels you to watch to the end. Even the narration is spot-on. 

Not only did the videos earn respectable views directly on YouTube through The Drum’s channel—getting 10,000 total views—it also attracted 2,000 new website visitors and 200 requests for the book. More important, Stein IAS was able to use the videos in its pitches for new business, leading to several new client engagements. 

Congratulations to Reuben Webb, Tom Stein, Dave Croucher and Chris Place, along with the rest of the talent whose names appear in the credits at the end of each video.

Microsoft blogs are plentiful, focusing on products, services, milestones, news and other themes. The argument could easily be made that the organization didn’t need one more. Instead, though, Microsoft’s newest blog, Transform, has won first place in the “Blog” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

Transform focuses on Microsoft’s customers and partners and the things they do with the organization’s technology. These are “the stories that we tell our families over dinner at night, the stories that make us proud to work at Microsoft.” 

Launched in spring 2016, Transform has achieved hundreds of thousands of engagements across multiple social media channels, and its performance has continued to improve every month. 

Stories include the tale of a hospital in Missouri that developed an app to monitor babies born with a serious heart disease, a post about how household water heaters were converted into an “internet of things”-fueled, cloud-based power grid, and how one customer created a tracker to find out if his cat was gaining weight from eating at other homes in the neighborhood (resulting in a social network for pets). 

The team behind the blog spent about five months building and refining Transform’s editorial processes, leading to audience growth of 805 percent. If further proof of Transform’s effectiveness is needed, consider that the team that manages it is routinely pitched with story ideas.

Kudos to Meg Manazir and Monica Fisher for an outstanding blog.