Development of Social Media Widgets Helps Ad Council Reach
Online Community
Brownstein Group Brand Communication has completed the
development of three widgets for The Advertising Council's Share
Your Voice initiative (www.adcouncil.org/icare).
The Share Your Voice initiative enables the Ad Council to engage
its campaign target audiences in their national public service
campaigns through a series of social widgets, which feature the
PSAs. More than half of the Ad Council's 50 national PSA campaigns
are participating in the initiative, and Brownstein Group was
brought on to develop the widgets for the Financial Literacy,
Nutrition Education and Arts Education programs.
"As audiences turn more and more to social media, we as
marketers need to embrace this change and find new ways to
communicate and share our messages with audiences," states Adam
Deringer, chief digital officer at Brownstein Group. "It's
great to see a national non-profit such as the Ad Council recognize
this and launch an initiative to bring its important messages to
the social media environment."
Through the Share Your Voice initiative, users are presented
with a list of participating Ad Council causes and are prompted to
choose as many as they would like to support. Each selection
generates an individual widget that can be prominently displayed on
the user's social networking profile, blog, wiki and personal
homepages. Each widget tracks and displays in real time the size of
its exponentially growing support network, acting as further
encouragement for users to recruit their friends to join. The
widgets feature the Ad Council's existing PSAs and other campaign
components, including television ads, brochures and links to
websites, and encourage multiple viewings and interest around these
communities through live updates of their growth.
"We are excited to launch these new widgets developed by Brownstein
Group. The Share Your Voice program is a wonderful way to further
engage our target audiences in our important public service
messages and to encourage them to help grow the online communities
of support for the campaigns," said Barbara Shimaitis, senior vice
president of Interactive Services at the Ad Council.
The Ad Council's website (www.adcouncil.org/icare) serves as a
hub, providing a simple distribution point for the widgets. The
Share Your Voice initiative first launched in September 2008 in
conjunction with Advertising Week.