Objective

Create awareness about and engagement in Seattle’s deep literary roots as a means of driving interest in visiting Seattle.

Strategy

Seattle is one of two North American cities designated as a UNESCO City of Literature. As such, we invited potential travelers to experience the city that has inspired readers and authors alike across myriad channels. Core to the effort was:

• A branded content series honored excerpts from the many stories that have been set in Seattle.
• A digitally-driven integration with The Atlantic promoted this series and Seattle in highly relevant places.
• A hosted poetry session at The Atlantic Festival showcasing diverse voices.
• We placed #BookNooks in key outdoor locations that offered people a peek inside these stories and doubled as a little free library of Seattle-inspired books.
• Jeffrey Dean Morgan hails from Dead City as well as the Emerald City. To promote Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s episode of #Bookmarked, we leveraged the hype around Dead City’s season finale through social media.

Results

Goal: Drive awareness and engagement with Seattle’s literary story

• People have spent over 6,840,000 minutes, or 4,750 days, with this content. For comparison, Americans, on average, have streamed 62 days of Netflix since opening their account. Our results are 76x higher. Our content has also been viewed 8.5 million times.   
• We bested The Atlantic benchmarks for digital content engagement with our Culture Section First Impression Takeovers outpacing their engagement benchmarks by between 80% and 200%.
• Our Atlantic Festival poetry session drove the highest attendance for any underwriter breakout session at the 2023 Festival and it has since been viewed over 162,000 times on YouTube. 
• Our content integration with The Walking Dead garnered over 2MM impressions, 550,000 content views, and 171,000 engagements in just one week. Not only was this effort the most engaging social partnership across all AMC social platforms - including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - in July, but it was also the most engaging content across all content categorized as a brand/tv drama partnerships on Meta in July. This content integration was also:
  • One of the top 5 most engaging social TV drama partnerships YTD on Instagram
  • One of the top 3 most engaging social Cable Drama partnerships YTD on Instagram.
  • The #7 most engaging social Cable Drama partnership YTD on Facebook.

Media