Dive Brief:
- Marketers are finding Instagram an enticing platform to reach the millennial audience.
- Capital One took advantage of social media advertising by utilizing three influencers from among the platform's users for its “What’s in your wallet?” campaign.
- This approach also provided Capital One with inroads into the Gen X and Baby Boomer audience.
Dive Insight:
From among the social media landscape, Instagram and Snapchat have millennial-heavy audiences -- and marketers are taking advantage of the platforms' reach.
"[Instagram is] a rich place to reach [millennials]. Instagram is more compelling than Pinterest or Tumblr -- just given the audience sizes and growth," Noha Abdalla, Capital One's senior director of digital brand strategy and social media, told Adweek.
The three Instagram influencers were given access to Capital One's account to post images and videos based on the ongoing “What’s in your wallet?” campaign. Nine pictures were turned into Instagram ads, and according to Capital One, ad recall among all consumers rose to 16%. (It jumped higher for Baby Boomers to 25%.) Specifically among millennials, Capital One's brand favorability increased 3%.
About the effort, Abdalla said, "Many people carry around a wallet that has something sentimental in it other than what's functional. Oftentimes, that memory is an indicator of something in the future."
Beyond reaching the millennial audience, Capital One found the campaign achieved impressive recall from Gen Xers and Baby Boomers as well. Because of the success of this effort Capital One intends to utilize user-generated content in multi-channel campaigns, including Instagram’s carousel ad units.
