City of Manhattan
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Boston and S&N Design partnered to create a public awareness campaign for the City of Manhattan to promote healthy behavior and enable Manhattan businesses to stay safe and open. The team created a targeted video campaign to encourage citizens, students and soldiers to wear face masks and maintain social distancing.
We identified two target audiences for the campaign — a “general population” audience made up of adults in the Manhattan and Fort Riley areas, and a “young adult” audience in the same locations. After identifying our targets, we wrote, filmed and animated multiple videos for each audience.
Using demographic and behavioral information, we decided which media platforms would be most efficient and cost effective in reaching our target audiences. The campaign included a mix of cable and OTT (streaming services) spots along with Facebook, Instagram and YouTube ads.
At the end of the campaign, we reached over 50,000 people with over 340,000 impressions and successfully communicated with our target audiences.
Videos
We worked closely with City of Manhattan staff to develop the right messages for the videos. We combined a fun, hopeful tone with an appeal to a sense of community and an “all in this together” attitude. For the younger audience, a playful, humorous mood was set, while the general population received a more serious take. We recruited local talent to appear in the videos, then created concise, engaging spots.
Five live-action videos and one animated video helped spread the same message to our two audiences: Wear a mask to protect our community and “keep MHK safe and open.”
Cable and OTT Spots
Knowing that streaming platforms are more popular than ever — especially with younger audiences — we placed video spots through OTT. We reached both target audiences through these placements, and also purchased traditional cable spots to reach the general population.
Social Media Ads
Considering our audiences’ demographics and where they spend most of their time online, we chose a blend of social media platforms for each. Since younger people tend to spend more time on YouTube than other platforms, we used a higher percentage of their budget there. However, older citizens tend to be more active on Facebook, so we dedicated a larger portion of their budget to ads there. To make sure we reached as many people as possible, we set up a blend of platforms for each audience.
