Case Study: Engaging Bloggers to Create Ad Content

At The Motherhood, we organize and manage creative campaigns with bloggers, typically in partnership with PR agencies or brand marketing managers. On a fairly regular basis, though, advertisers ask us for help in creating authentic content for print ads, as well as shining a social media spotlight on those ads.

Here’s an example:

Media company Hearst, which publishes dozens of women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, ELLE and O, the Oprah Magazine, asked The Motherhood to create a campaign that would engage bloggers to expand the reach of one of their advertisers, a national ice cream brand.

Planned for the July issue of dozens of Hearst’s women’s magazines, the ice cream brand had purchased a one-page advertisement to share tips on guilt-free summer indulgences, which aligned with the messaging of their newly launched, no-sugar-added ice cream products.

Beginning in February, with enough lead time to provide content for the magazine ads, The Motherhood brought in 15 high-impact food and lifestyle bloggers to participate in the campaign. The two most influential bloggers were asked to provide several tips for summer indulgences that eventually appeared in the print magazine advertisement. Additionally, all 15 bloggers sampled the new ice cream products and published review blog posts (with photos) on July 1, the day the ad hit newsstands, to extend the messaging of the new no-sugar-added ice cream products and other summer indulgences to the blogosphere.

The campaign resulted in beautiful blog coverage and social media extensions garnering five million impressions for the brand in one day, and it brought their advertising messaging online to live indefinitely on the digital bookshelf.

If you’re an advertiser interested in a similar program, please email us for a customized campaign recommendation at contact@themotherhood.com.