How Deloitte's video competition engages internal and external audiences
In this extract from Melcrum's Viral communication in the workplace report, find out how Deloitte inspired its employees using a video competition to create a brand-awareness campaign that resonated with internal and external audiences.
"It all began when I was on vacation with
my kids and they were spending all
their time sitting at the computer,
laughing uncontrollably at the videos on
YouTube," says Brian Fugere (pictured, right), partner at
Deloitte Consulting responsible for
special projects relating to brand, strategy
and communication. “And one of my
sons spent the rest of the vacation
making videos.”
Fugere witnessed this transaction –
generations Y and Z being completely
comfortable with being amateur filmmakers,
having all the technology to support it, and
eagerly sharing their work on video-sharing
sites – and recognized that here was an
unrealized opportunity in the formal world
of internal communication. “I thought:
There’s something in this. There’s
something here we need to be tapping
into. And that’s how the Deloitte Film
Festival was born.”
There’s something about video that’s so engaging to gen Y – and I felt that was something we could take advantage of.
Employee-generated ideas
Film, in particular, was beginning to
intrigue Fugere for a number of reasons:
- Ease of use
“Filmmaking has become democratized by technology now – anyone can make a little movie and show it to the world. The content tools that were once the preserve of big departments are now available to everyone.” - Natural impact
“There’s something about video that’s so engaging to generation Y – and I felt that was something we could take advantage of to gain impact with that audience.” - User-generated content revolution
Fugere remarks on 2007’s Superbowl as a telling moment. The TV advertising during the Superbowl broadcast is as famous in the US as the game itself – with the guaranteed biggest TV audience of the year, a tradition has developed for advertisers to showcase their very best new work, and it’s always eagerly awaited. Since companies know that the audience is watching and waiting for something special, spots go for astronomical amounts.
For the 2007 Superbowl, a 30-second spot cost an average sales price of $2.6 million and that year, Frito-Lay famously bought one – and then turned it over to a user-generated video competition. The best home-made Doritos commercial, as rated on a specially set-up video-sharing website, would get the Frito-Lay slot during the Superbowl.
Over 1,000 amateurs submitted entries. “So you’re watching companies turning over that number one advertising spot to consumers,” remarks Fugere. “And that’s just the kind of end-point of a whole revolution in which you’re finding, increasingly, organizations are turning to customers to provide their content. So, I figured, we really should be watching and learning from this, and turning that logic internally. If they’re deciding it’s the best way to engage audiences out in the external world, we can’t ignore it internally.”When you put this stuff up on the internet, as long as real people made it, you have an impact.
- The marketing power of user-generated content
As well as the widespread publicity in the media, the “Doritos Crash the Superbowl” site got some four million views in the voting run-up, showing the viral marketing power of user-generated content. “So that was something else to take on board – when you put this stuff up on the internet, even when it’s clearly marketing a company or its products, as long as real people made it, you have an impact. That was something else we wanted to use.”
Matching the medium to the message: Recruitment
The question was how to use it – it
couldn’t be just video for video’s sake. It
had to be something that encouraged
employee-generated videos, was able to be
fun while also being in line with a
strategic business need, and could then
have a viral impact in the external world.
The answer came from a Deloitte hot
button: recruitment.
“We’ve been growing very rapidly in
recent years and the competition for
talent is so fierce now that it’s something
the whole business is focused on,”
Fugere says. “Every business is
competing for the upper echelons of
talent, so we knew this was somewhere
we could point it and it’d be purposeful.”
One of the things that matters to these people is what life’s really like inside the company.
So the decision was made – the company would encourage employees to create their own videos, representing what life was like inside Deloitte and what it meant to them, with the end result being a genuine, authentic and fun picture of real life lived in the company, designed to appeal to the US talent market. The concept was a perfect fit for both:
- The medium: What better way to show potential recruits life inside the organization than through videos made by actual Deloitte employees? “One of the things that matters to these people is what life’s really like inside the company,” Fugere points out. “Not just some corporate spin on it: ‘What’s the human life inside the building, if you’re going to expect me to live in there every day?’”
- The audience: User-generated, “authentic” communication was something this generation of potential employees would understand. “We do a lot of recruiting on campus, so it seemed like the perfect fit. We’re primarily looking to recruit people in that Generation Y, 20-to-25-year-old bracket, and film is a medium they’re comfortable with, that they understand. And a user-generated amateur film series would be something they could get into.” But this also wasn’t to be some corporate messaging, driven through a wooden medium. The project team worked hard to make sure every last detail would resonate with the desired audience – and that went down to what the videos would say.
"What's your Deloitte?"
“We started off by saying, ‘Well, maybe
we’ll make it about our core values: show
us videos of people exemplifying the
values,’” explains Fugere. But, pretty
quickly, it became clear that that just
wasn’t good enough.
“It wouldn’t wash with this audience. Generation Y focus groups just came back to us and said: ‘Give me a break, that’s way too corporate.’”
So, in the end, it was pared back to a tight but open “What’s Your Deloitte?” – something that was relevant to the organization, that touched on the ideas they wanted it to have (i.e., a picture inside the organization), but without the heavy hand of a “corporate values marketing exercise”.
All that we wanted, really, was for our people to get to the heart of what Deloitte meant to them.
“It was a simple enough concept not to be too prescriptive or propagandist,” says Fugere. “But it was also descriptive enough to encourage people to produce the kind of things we had in mind. All that we wanted, really, was for our people to get to the heart of what Deloitte meant to them, and to show that feeling to people who might want to join us. And that’s what they did.”
Spreading awareness
A YouTube-style site was launched on the
intranet, to which teams could upload
their videos, vote on their favorites and
leave comments.
The call went out internally in June 2007
for teams to put some time and effort into
creating their videos.
An integrated, widely-branded communication campaign spread awareness throughout the business with posters and leaflets, and highlighted some of the great prizes on offer for the winners. (First prize: a trip for the whole team to the Sundance Film Festival in Colorado. Second prize: a team “Hollywood Experience” in Los Angeles).
“Film festival guy"
The team created their own irreverent
internal marketing campaign, featuring “Film Festival
Guy”, a wildly enthusiastic champion
who presented instructional videos on
how to make movies, encouraging people
to take part, raiding the board room to
drum up support and showing how it
could be done.
“It was a pretty cheeky marketing approach – very uncorporate, very irreverent,” says Fugere. “We really fed off that whole ‘uncorporate’ thing that underscored the whole program, and which we knew would be critical if we were going to get people to make videos and then get potential recruits to actually believe in them.”
Fun, interesting and authentic
“And it gives you that edge – so it has a
double impact in encouraging people,
virally, to take part,” says Fugere. “It’s
actually fun and interesting, so people will
look at it, and it’s so unexpected to see
that from a big consultancy that you get a
bit of extra credit for that as well.”
“If it’s something that feels corporate, regardless of how authentic the content is, it’s going to die a death. People aren’t stupid and this generation in particular are so savvy. They’re so used to being sold to, they’re totally tuned to being even slightly misled or given overhyped nonsense. So if you can battle through that wariness and win, you really win big time.”
Over 30,000 people had viewed and voted and there’d been over 400,000 hits to the internal website.
Massive response
By the time the competition closed after
four months, over 2,000 of Deloitte’s US
employees had participated in the making
of videos, with 400 entries submitted.
Fourteen videos were selected as
finalists, and went through a process of
revoting.
By the end of September 2007, over 30,000 people had viewed and voted and there’d been over 400,000 hits to the internal website.
“The Director's circle"
Resourcing in local communication is
always an issue, so Fugere and the Film
Festival team looked to solve it by
fashioning a brand-building resource out of
those with existing enthusiasm. “We
realized that there are some people in this
world who are just crazy about film. So we
recruited them.”
“The Directors Circle” was a self-selected group of champions for the Film Festival, recruited off the back of some simple communication: “Are you interested?” They were given access to the inner workings of the whole competition, given materials (posters, flyers) to distribute and asked to drum up support for it in their local areas. “We brought them into the inner circle and said, ‘We want you to be our promoters’. So, they really facilitated the process totally inside all the local offices.”
It was, says Fugere, an enormous leap
forward. “They were just a huge part of
the program – most of all because it
stopped it being corporate. It made it more
of a peer-to-peer thing. If you want
something to go viral, the chances of this
happening diminish in relation to the
extent to which people feel it’s a
headquarters thing.”
Differentiated brand
Compilations of the videos were
distributed to the campus recruiters and
the feedback was immensely positive. “It’s
very difficult to translate this kind of thing
into a quantitative measurement yield,”
says Fugere, “but qualitatively, the
feedback’s been outstanding.”
Of particular relevance here is differentiation. In external communication terms, a strong, viscerally attractive and differentiated brand is undoubtedly a vital element of marketing appeal, yet almost impossible to quantify with an ROI of its own. So it is in recruitment.
“One of the
most crucial factors for these guys is, ‘How do we distinguish ourselves?’”
explains Fugere. “There are so many other
companies offering so many deals to high-flying students at graduate fairs that it’s
almost impossible not to look like just
another big company with a glossy
package.
It hit all this potential talent on a gut level in a positive way, showing them a really appealing side to our organization.
So, the feedback we got from the recruiters doing the rounds on the campuses was that this was amazing – it wasn’t just hugely popular with students, it was something that none of them would forget and it hit all this potential talent on a gut level in a really positive way, showing them a really appealing side to our organization. For a campaign that cost us almost nothing, you really can’t begin to put an ROI on that.”
Showing a real human side
It is, he says, another element of the
Generation Y angle that organizations are
going to have to wake up to – people want
to work for organizations that show a real
human side, not just a “corporately
written”, human side. “It’s like an
extension of [the psychologist] Maslow,”
he says. “This generation says, ‘Every
company can give me all the basics –
food, shelter and safety. Which one of
you’s going to give me something else,
something that feels like a relationship?’”
External recognition
Learning from a previous viral success, and recognizing
that this was a recruitment tool, the team
also saw there could be some capital in
taking this further, so the 14 finalist videos
were uploaded onto YouTube itself. So far,
some of the videos have received almost
20,000 hits (see the clip of "The Green Dot" below, Figure 1) – and have allowed Deloitte
employees worldwide to get a taste of
what life is like in the US offices.
Figure 1. "The Green Dot" has so far racked up 17,815 hits and counting
And there’s been one form of hard result which the campaign was seen to contribute to: Deloitte was named “Best Place to Launch a Career” last year by BusinessWeek.
This is the greatest morale-building thing the firm has ever done. You have no idea how much buzz this has created.
In addition, one of the most prominently featured elements of the publication’s lead article on the award results talked about the “What’s Your Deloitte?” video campaign, what it said about the organization and what a creative look inside the organization it provided.
Manager and partner feedback
It also resonated inside the business.
Some of the feedback from managers and
partners inside the business included:
- “[It makes you realize] you have an impact. And you can have some ownership in how we present ourselves to the outside world.”
- “When you look at other companies, you realize how special this opportunity was.”
- “This is the greatest morale-building thing the firm has ever done. You have no idea how much buzz this has created.”
View a four-minute video about the Deloitte Film Festival in Figure 2, below.
Figure 2. Deloitte Film Festival Behind the scenes
Have your say
Do you have the freedom at your organization to instigate such energizing employee projects? If you've worked on a similar engagement and branding strategy at your organization, tell us all about it below.
First published by Melcrum in 2008.
Recommended resources:
TOP TIPS: Five steps for making an internal communications film
Melcrum report: Viral communication in the workplace
A communicator's guide to Generation Y
ONLINE LIBRARY All channels and new media articles