This year’s after Thanksgiving sales events made headlines before the holiday season kicked off with the announcement that many retailers will be opening their doors as early as Thanksgiving eve. In an effort to ease tension for those working on Black Friday, Seattle’s Best Coffee decided to give away free coffee in a Facebook giveaway. The client had their own internal monitoring arrangements, but we ran a report just to have an idea of how the story did and we found that the “Free Coffee” story had over 100 broadcasts, with an audience of almost 3.5 million within days of the distribution.
This, along with a story distributed recently for Pizza Hut, is a great example of what works vs. what doesn’t for B-rolls this year. Staged events, contest finales and other gimmicky stories are not doing as well as quick, reader type stories that can be easily digested by both the producer and consumer in under 30 seconds. Pizza Hut came to us wanting to get coverage of a mini Mayflower replica ship made out of pizza boxes. We advised them to go with a news story – A record one million pizzas sold the day before Thanksgiving, the busiest weekday night of the year – rather than the cute kicker item. They took our strategic advice and the results were 40+ broadcasts and an audience of over 1.5 million on the first day.