Understanding Your Audience: How Gigantic Uses Short-Form Videos to Reach Younger Audiences

Myer Venzon

In 2021, Gigantic Idea Studio began producing short videos for the Clean Water Program Alameda County, featuring the popular mascots Fred the Frog and Izzy Egret. A study by the University of Delaware found that, “while mascots may be great at inspiring action through their cheers and high fives, the biggest impacts of mascots may come through displays of disappointment with a negative outcome”. With this in mind, we focused on messaging that showed the impact of pollution on Fred and Izzy.

A key strategy was to distribute the videos through paid promotion on platforms that were popular with younger audiences. At the time, TikTok was becoming a popular platform with Gen Z, so in addition to producing the short videos in the traditional horizontal format, we created vertical versions to allow an optimized experience on TikTok. Gigantic Idea Studio created a TikTok channel for the campaign, and also posted the videos on Instagram Reels.

Fred & Izzy on TikTok

The results were impressive. The vertical version of the Dog Poop video had a CPM of $2.36, compared to $7.12 for the horizontal version on YouTube. Although views are counted differently depending on the platform, the TikTok version of the video also received more views than on YouTube, despite having double the budget.

Gigantic Idea Studio also found success with organic content on Instagram Reels. Its first reel received 3,059 views, compared to the average of 26 views for its previous horizontal video posts. On Earth Day 2023, we posted another reel that received 1,318 views.

To date, Gigantic Idea Studio’s TikTok channel has received 1,720,973 views of 8 videos, through 14 campaigns, and 9,543 likes with 482 followers.

Takeaways

Gigantic Idea Studio’s success teaches a few important lessons about reaching younger audiences with short-form videos:

  • Use humor and creativity. Younger audiences are attracted to content that is entertaining and engaging.
  • Keep it short and sweet. Younger audiences have short attention spans, so aim for videos that are 30 seconds or less.
  • Use vertical video. Younger audiences are more likely to watch videos on their mobile devices, so make sure your videos are formatted vertically.
  • Promote your videos on the right platforms. TikTok is a great platform for reaching younger audiences, but other platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are also gaining popularity.

If you’re looking to reach younger audiences with your marketing content, consider using short-form videos. Just be sure to keep the above tips in mind to create videos that are engaging and effective.

The Social Media Swamp: How to Deal with Anti-Environmental Comments

Lisa Duba

meme - what the otter sees
Dealing with the social swamp isn’t easy

As many of us know from running environmental campaigns on social media: online platforms bring out the best in some and the worst in others. It can be disheartening to learn that not everyone is as supportive of clean water, wildlife, or air quality as we are. What seems a no-brainer to us, (do you actually WANT pollution in your water?), is anathema to others.

For some of us who monitor these online conversations, (and I include myself here) it may be hard to read and manage negative comments that target our work or the things we are trying to protect. Fortunately, my unflappable colleague at Gigantic, Nancy Roberts, coached me through this aspect of our work in our recent campaign for Respect Wildlife. In this blog, I’ll share what I learned from her “Keep Calm and Carry On” approach to social media management. You can view the campaign here.

Nancy’s Top 3 Social Media Comment Tips

1. Don’t take comments personally. If monitoring comments becomes mentally taxing, take breaks or assign the task to someone else.

2. Understand that comments are data points.

3. Establish a comment policy: Include how you will deal with profanity, bullying, slurs, violent language, or other troublesome content, and create a threshold for when you will hide or delete a comment. If you are a government agency, you may need to adhere to free speech regulations and let comments stand, more so than nonprofits or private businesses, which can set their own policies.

For Facebook: Hide rather than delete comments. This will prevent conflict.
For Instagram: You can’t hide comments; delete only if absolutely necessary.
For Twitter: You cannot hide replies; if they are truly egregious you can report to Twitter.

Decide how/if you want to respond to comments. In most cases we recommend no response unless there is significant misinformation. Let other commenters step in to present an alternative viewpoint or challenge the naysayers. This is more authentic.

Lessons Learned from Our Recent Respect Wildlife Campaign:

As mentioned above, comments are rich sources of feedback, even the negative ones. Here are some takeaways on the campaign that we and the client gained through comment feedback:

  • Not everyone loves animals or cares if animals are hurt. (Especially seagulls!) Some people view humans at the top of food chain, and therefore it’s ok show dominance. While not the majority, this view is especially hard to deal with, but an important thing to remember. Appeals to protection, being a good person, etc. will not work for this type of individual.
  • Regulations, even those meant to protect vulnerable species, are viewed by a vocal minority as government control and overreach, and inspire especially negative comments.
  • Not everyone understands or supports a humorous approach. Many expressed enjoyment of the campaign’s exaggerated artwork style, but it inspired some very literal thinkers to call out the “falsehoods” shown in the memes. (We actually did know that otters don’t really see humans as swamp creatures!)
  • If feeding or approaching wildlife is “fun” for humans and pets, it’s considered harmless.

Good luck on your next social media campaign! I hope you connect with supporters and learn from the detractors.

Gigantic is Hiring a Marketing and Public Outreach Associate!

Nancy Roberts

We’re hiring! GIS logoThe Marketing and Public Outreach Associate (MPOA) will be in charge of developing strategies for delivering communications and advertising content to the intended audience. Our campaigns promote environmental programs and behaviors on topics such as wildlife protection, recycling, waste reduction, local ordinances, gardening workshops, composting, litter prevention, water pollution prevention and more.

The MPOA associate enjoys planning and executing both online and offline strategies to reach diverse audiences. From running social media and digital ads and sending e-blasts, to working with local and online influencers and community, businesses or business organizations, our goal is to create community-based outreach plans for our clients that deliver measurable engagement. Our campaigns range from hyper-local (cities, neighborhoods) to regional or California-wide.

Ideal candidate has experience in planning, managing and reporting online and off-line marketing, including:

  • Managing paid promotions in house: set up ads on Google/YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok; and expand reach to other platforms, as appropriate
  • Managing media buys with vendors
  • Implementing E-blasts, e-mail campaigns
  • Placing and managing streaming audio or video ads
  • Staying current with best practices of social media and digital advertising, and updating the Gigantic team
  • Familiarity with and ability to negotiate, purchase and place ads for print, outdoor, point-of-sale and other offline promotions

Additional experience or interest in one or more of the following is also highly desired:

  • Setting up/managing webinars or online workshops
  • Planning and posting social media content
  • Creating social media/media content
  • Copywriting

Additional qualifications:

  • Great communication and presentation skills are a must: the Associate will communicate and present media plans and campaign results to committees, clients and our internal team.
  • Multi-cultural media experience and/or bilingual in another language is a big plus.
  • Ability and interest in further training and skill-building is also a must. We are small firm and ideal candidates like the flexibility of doing more than one type of task/role within our tight-knit and supportive team. We are willing to provide training for the right candidate to attain optimal job performance

We offer:

  • Competitive compensation based on candidate’s experience, portfolio and references.
  • A supportive small-team company culture.
  • Benefits include health insurance, IRA contribution, paid vacation, sick and holiday time
  • We are open to discussing arrangements from 30 to 37 hours/week.
  • Associates can work from home at this time, but we prefer some days in the office when we get to post-COVID conditions.

Please submit a resume and cover letter, and include a description and results of one sample campaign that you implemented. Email to [email protected]

 

Selling Nothing: Can Re-Homing Replace Discarding?

The Gigantic Team

One of the challenges of zero waste outreach is how to convince people to NOT do something: buy new stuff.  Every day Americans are bombarded by thousands of slick, seductive ads encouraging the purchase of shiny new things that they may or may not need.  Helping the public to understand that “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” is a list in priority of importance is tricky. How can reducing consumption be positioned as a positive?

While residents contemplate a New Year clean-out, our recent “Re-Solve to Re-Home” campaign for Zero Waste Marin introduced three alternative solutions to throwing away: “Swap. Donate. Share.” This messaging allowed us to position a positive, feel-good message to finding new homes for old items. We were able to take advantage of the recent uptick in “Buy Nothing” groups and other social media outlets for neighbor-to-neighbor ways to swap stuff.

We also experimented with the message that we all learned back in kindergarten: the feel-good advantage of sharing. We incorporated this into the Marin campaign with a pitch for cooperative ownership and neighborhood tool lending libraries.

Encouraging source reduction in a consumer society is an uphill battle but reframing “not buying” as doing something more social and fun or helpful is an important part of the effort!

 

Multi-touch Outreach: Getting in Gear with Riders Recycle

Nicole Greenspan

As attention spans get shorter and shorter, it’s necessary to repeat a message many times over just to be remembered, let alone shift a behavior. For our Riders Recycle program that aims to increase used motor oil and filter recycling among Do-It-Yourself (DIY) motorcyclists, our strategy is to provide multiple placements of consistent messaging about motorcycle oil and filter recycling, including in-person outreach at events; a comprehensive website; consistent social media posts; and targeted online advertising. Through a recent survey, we found a quarter of DIYers (people who change their own oil and filters) across our 10 client jurisdictions did NOT recycle their used oil filters, so we knew we had to bring awareness to used oil filter recycling.

San Mateo County DIYers with free oil filter recycling drainer containers at the San Mateo County Fair.

IN-PERSON

Local motorcycle events are an ideal venue for reaching the target audience of gear heads. We bought oil filter recycling drainer containers for give-aways to make it easier for DIYers to drain and then recycle their filters. We asked questions at events to understand what people were doing with their used oil filters and some of the key barriers to recycling. (Learn more about the importance of the messenger, message and materials for in-person outreach in our March blog post.) Half of DIYers who weren’t recycling their oil filters were stockpiling them, so we focused on this behavior to develop an online social media and ad campaign.

This Facebook video ad encourages DIYers to seal up their stockpiled oil filters and drop them off at a local collection center.

ONLINE

Our online presence helps us reach more people more often throughout the year. The Riders Recycle website has information about how to dispose of used oil and filters, drop-off locations, a calendar of events for DIYers to get free oil and filter recycling materials, and a DIY oil and filter change blog. From the website analytics, we could see that Riders Recycle blog posts were some of the most popular pages on the site. Our most recent blog post includes easy-to-read content, pictures of how to prepare oil filters for recycling and an embedded map of drop-off locations, addressing several of the barriers and questions we receive in one place.

Riders Recycle has a growing social media presence, supported by targeted advertising. Facebook is great for maintaining a relationship with your community, sharing events and gaining new followers with geo- and interest-targeted ads. For Facebook, Google, and Bay Area Riders Forum, we created simple filter-focused GIF/video ads that encourage DIYers to seal up their stockpiled oil filters and drop them off at a local collection center. We targeted motorcycle enthusiasts during the beginning of the high motorcycle riding season, garnering thousands of clicks and views and hundreds of thousands of impressions. Online advertising brought in more than a quarter of all California-based visitors to the website this year. The ad results and analytics help us learn more about key demographics of people who engaged with the content, which can inform future content and ad development.

While there isn’t a “one size fits all” approach to effective marketing, using research to develop appropriate content for in-person outreach, website, social media channels and targeted advertising can help you reach your audience enough times and, in enough places, to increase the likelihood of action.

Facebook Changes…Panic Time?

Nancy Roberts

Consistent hashtag use, attractive visuals and a clear call to action, as in this post from StopWaste, will help your posts’ reach.

It has always been a challenge for mission-driven Brand Pages, such as public agencies, to reach and grow their followers on Facebook. In January Facebook announced they are “changing the News Feed to prioritize posts from friends, family members and groups over posts from publishers and brands.” The stated reason is to promote a more fulfilling experience with the channel and discourage “passive scrolling” without engagement. The change will favor posts that elicit comments, rather than passive consumption or “likes.” (“Favoring” means that posts will show to more people.)

One impetus for the decision is recent negative press about Facebook, including hosting fake news and being purposely designed to foster addictive behaviors and to keep fans “hooked” on the channel. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated his personal commitment to leading these changes, thanks to a new view of his creation’s strengths and weaknesses.

How Will Facebook Algorithm Changes Affect Me?

Organizational Facebook pages are reaching just a tiny fraction of their followers with each post. Even before the latest changes, organic reach for Facebook Pages was plummeting, from nearly 100% of fans in 2007 to less than 2% today.

Some immediate predictions include:

  • People will spend less time (but supposedly higher quality time) on Facebook.
  • Posts may become more “shocking” with the goal of eliciting reactions.
  • Comments will be prized, and the longer the better.

Note: this announcement includes no changes to the advertising model, which many critics point to as the fount of toxicity.

What Can I Do?

What is a page manager to do? Like the stock market, it’s probably best to keep calm and carry on, rather than trying to overhaul strategy with every change. There are widely varying predictions of the result of this latest action.

Gigantic recommends to all clients:

  • Continue posting high quality, relevant content.
  • Consider making posts more conversational in style and asking for feedback and responses, including encouraging people to tag your organization.
  • Focus on quality of posts more than quantity; this becomes even more true with the renewed emphasis on posts that promote conversation.
  • Monitor your posts and respond to comments promptly, using a consistent “voice” for your page.
  • Be prepared for decreased reach of videos, which had been highly favored by the Facebook algorithm.  (Facebook’s reasoning is that videos promote passive consumption rather than active dialogue.) Consider incorporating calls for reaction and encouraging dialogue about your video posts.
  • Continue to incorporate ads and boosted posts to increase your messages’ reach.
  • Be a good neighbor: Share and tag other organizations’ content in your posts, as long as they are relevant to you.
  • Don’t Panic!

As always, Gigantic Idea Studio is happy to discuss your social media strategy and make recommendations to enhance your environmental outreach.

 

Sez Who? Picking the Right Messenger for Environmental Outreach

Nancy Roberts

As we work on environmental behavior change campaigns, we spend a lot of time crafting the perfect look and wording – to get the message right. Choosing the right messenger for that message is essential for its success. The Gigantic team’s presentation at the 2017 California Resource Recovery Association Conference covered several aspects of thinking about the best messenger.

Sometimes a public agency’s message can be strengthened and find traction when delivered in a different voice. The messenger’s “personality” can take several forms and can be delivered live, in print and digitally:

Mascots

Mascots have the power to attract and engage people and make them care about issues such as recycling, waste or water quality. Creating and implementing a mascot messenger takes planning, patience and creativity. We presented examples of recent environmental mascots and talked about the process for creating, naming, scripting and distributing a mascot.

Peers

A message is easier to accept if the viewer identifies with the person delivering the message. Our presentation touched on how to evoke thoughts like “Well, if she can do it, so can I” or “I want to be more like that person” in an environmental campaign, by recruiting community members to deliver the message.

Social Media

It’s easy to treat social media like another advertising channel for promoting your organization’s events and campaigns. But social media can be so much more than a digital bulletin board. We looked at ways to establish a personality on social media that doesn’t just tell folks what to do, but that interacts, observes, and participates in the broader online community. One excellent example is Baltimore’s Mr. Trash Wheel, who demonstrates best practices for tone and engagement.

Here is the CRRA presentation covering the above topics. Please let us know if you have questions or would like to talk about how the right messenger can work for you.

 

Touched by the Cart: Five Recycling Videos with Emotional Appeal

Nancy Roberts

Stevie Wonder sings in a recycling video from the early 1990s
Stevie Wonder sings in a 1991 recycling PSA.


Haulers, waste agencies and environmental outreach professionals have been working for decades to improve the U.S. recycling rate, yet overall the country’s recycling rate is around 34 percent – so there is much room for improvement.

Part of the challenge that we see is putting the emphasis on operational facts before attracting people with an emotional appeal.  Search for “recycling” in YouTube and you get almost 900,000 results. Most of the top hits focus on how to recycle. Some examine if it works, or problems with recycling. But very few focus on why people should recycle, which is a very important factor in encouraging behavior change. In fact, the video results indicate how we take recycling for granted, assuming everyone is already on board and participating. The truth is, even with established behavioral practices, it helps to periodically boost morale with a new appeal that is fun, moving, or otherwise stirs our feelings.

There’s a kind of taxonomy that emerges if you look at enough videos that encourage recycling. Here are some categories with examples of different approaches, mostly light-hearted, that aim to increase recycling and composting activities:

“Here’s What to Do”

This is a classic “what goes where” video from Livonia, Michigan.  The viewer is given no context, no appeal to emotion, just “this is what to do.” (And it’s not so simple, either!). While the information is important, the delivery could be more compelling:

Hot Tunes and Celebrity Sightings

This 1991 classic from an earlier time of recycling outreach has action-packed celebrity sightings and groovy music in an attempt to make recycling cool. The video played on MTV and in move houses and was part of an integrated campaign by the Take it Back Foundation that included classroom curricula and the development of a resolution introduced to the House and Senate to declare April 15 “National Recycling Day.” It’s a great example of use of using a catchy campaign to increase awareness. (Bonus – how many of the celebs can you name?)

This Cal Recycle video combines humor and a self-deprecating celebrity “endorsement” from Ed Begley Jr., as the public is shown that you don’t have to be a star to make a difference.

Personifying Trash

Some campaigns take the point of view of the stuff being recycled rather than the recycler, as in this video from Keep America Beautiful. It was created following research that showed that only 10 percent of Americans have a recycling bin in their bathroom:

Personifying the Bin

If creating empathy for trash doesn’t help, how about empathy for the recycling and compost bins? Here’s one example from the UK, aimed at making folks more mindful of those useful outdoor bins:

At Gigantic, we thought that creating an organics cart mascot would raise awareness, and use of the green cart when we created this video for the City of Livermore:

We’ll be looking at the use of memorable messaging to increase recycling and composting participation during our session “Not Just the Facts, Ma’am: Getting the Message to Matter” at the CRRA conference this August. We hope to see you there!

Have You Heard? Word of Mouth Empowers Green Behavior Change

Nancy Roberts

2 women chatting over a fence
Good, old-fashioned word of mouth

A recent survey by the Consumer Electronics Association has some fairly depressing statistics (for example, 18 percent of consumers say they discarded electronics devices in the trash during the last year, a six point increase from 2012), but another result caught our eye: according to the survey, “nearly half of consumers (42 percent) first learned how to recycle their old devices by word of mouth from friends, family or co-workers.”

Surprising? Not at all. Study after study shows the importance of friends, family and co-workers on influencing all kinds of behavior. Nielsen’s 2013 survey of trust in advertising channels shows that 84% of respondents say word of mouth from family and friends was the most trustworthy form of persuasion.  For those of us involved in green behavior change, this is good news, since we usually don’t have the budget for Coca-Cola-style mass media campaigns. However, word of mouth still needs to be made simple in order to get your ideas to spread.

So how to design campaigns that enhance the power of friends and family?

To enable word of mouth, we need to reach people, give them the information they need in an appealing, trustworthy and shareable form, and help them to feel that their sharing will be appreciated. A writer for Forbes describes this as the three E’s: Engage, Equip and Empower.

Of course, word of mouth alone cannot create behavior change, but it can be an important tool in a multi-touch campaign. Some questions to ask while designing our environmental behavior change campaigns include:

Are we being clear? Are we using terms that make sense to our audience? As we’ve seen in our research, it’s not a good idea to make assumptions about what people know about waste or water quality.

Are we providing the tools that people need to spread the word? People will be more likely to spread the word if they are equipped with catchy facts, a story, or shareable content.  Is there such a thing as too many facts and data? For spreading messages, the answer is yes.

Have we asked for help?  So simple, but so frequently overlooked. Just by saying “Let your neighbors know …” or “Please Retweet or Share,” your messages are more likely to be spread. Thanking people afterwards is even more powerful.

As we plan for new behavior change campaigns in 2015, the Gigantic team will be focused on fostering the thousands of individual conversations, both off and online, that will move us closer to a sustainable world.  Let’s spread the word!

Cat Memes, Recycling, and Lessons Learned: Our New Year’s Poll Results

Nancy Roberts

At Gigantic, we always try to be creative and light-hearted, so when it came time to send a New Year’s greeting to our email list, we decided to try something a bit different: a greeting with a link to a five-second poll, asking folks to vote on which of the two images (below) they would most likely click:

composting fruitcakeOur greeting was sent to Gigantic’s email list and posted via Facebook and Twitter. We were delighted by the response: a 46% open rate on the email, a whopping 64% click-through rate, 101 poll votes and over a dozen comments on the blog. We know via Analytics that most of the visitors on January 6 (the day we published the poll) were new to our website, and that on average, folks stayed on our site nearly one minute — not bad for a 5-second poll!

Our original intent was to draw attention to the popularity of cat memes  and to suggest that pop culture knows a thing or two about spreading ideas. Well, you surprised us. The winner is … Option A! Receiving 58 percent of the votes, this more serious image showed a stale fruitcake going into a typical organics pail for composting. The adorable kitty, juggling the fruitcake before tossing it in the bin, garnered only 42 percent. This startled us on several counts (we thought the kitty was cute and was the obvious choice for attracting more eyeballs), and as we analyzed the results, we drew several lessons:

Clarity matters. Several comments argued that more specificity was needed in the kitten image, noting that it wasn’t clear that the fruitcake was destined for the bin in Option B. Our text asked two questions: “Which image are you more likely to click?” and then “Which image do you find more memorable and effective for getting out the food scrap recycling message?” In hindsight, we realize that combining “memorable” and “effective” confused the issue. Our intention was to illustrate the importance of getting attention before providing information; our wording needed work. Which leads us to:

Testing matters. Had this been a “real” campaign, we would have spent a lot more time designing our objectives and creating alternative messaging. Ideally we would have run a pilot, testing images, messages and the manner of distribution to match the kind of data we wanted to elicit.

Engagement matters. Before we can deliver any message, we have to cut through the “noise” and get attention. The volume of response, via email opens, click-throughs, and blog comments, far outran previous e-blasts to our clients. Frankly, this was one of our goals: to test how and if we could stand out amid the dozens of emailed New Year’s greetings. We focused on a short, punchy subject line that emphasized a time-limited response and a request for assistance (“help our research by taking this 5-second survey”). This probably aided our open and click-through rates.

Once we drew visitors to the blog post, we included the kitten picture as a way of drawing the eye, because we know the best messaging in the world won’t get through if we can’t attract attention. While the image in Option A may have been more clear, we note that much of the reaction centered around the kitten. Does this mean we’re suggesting that everyone should use kittens in their recycling campaigns from now on? Not at all. But paying attention to what’s “hot” in pop culture could yield some great outreach ideas that might lead to an increased waste diversion rate (or whatever your particular goal is).

As with all campaigns, we resolve to take this learning and build upon it for future efforts. Thanks to all who voted, and may your 2014 be filled with fun and effective green behavior change campaigns, with or without kittens!

Selected comments:

[table id=1 /]