Gold
2023 Best Social Impact Video
Best Buy Teen Tech Centers support teens from historically disinvested communities in preparing for jobs of the future. Teen Tech Centers are safe, after school learning sites where teens can access the latest technology, guidance from experienced mentors and opportunities to apply their skills through hands-on experiences. There are currently 52 Teen Tech Center locations, with plans to expand the network to at least 100 sites by 2025. The Best Buy Foundation provides Teen Tech Centers an annual grant to staff and run the programs, and funds a slate of national partner organizations to lead technical skills training. Each center has state-of-the-art technology that is mostly donated by Best Buy vendor partners.
OBJECTIVE
Recognizing the value of investing in opportunity and diversity across the creative economy, the Best Buy Foundation committed $10 million to build a new collective impact network of opportunities for youth in Los Angeles County. In particular, the initiative will focus on preparing LA-area youth for careers in the local creative economy, which on average pays more than double the national average wage and has seen a decline in diversity of Black and Hispanic workers.
Best Buy is committed to this same goal in their marketing and introduced the Mentor Moments campaign as an opportunity to both feature real-life stories of mentorship within Teen Tech Centers as well as create an opportunity for mentorship within the campaign production.
METHOD
The “Mentor Moments” campaign features three real stories of mentorship – each featuring a teen and mentor from a different location and was designed to showcase authentic relationships between teens and adult staff. To ensure that the community partners featured in these spots felt ownership of their story, director Rodney Lucas worked closely with each pair to put their voice front-and-center while creating the narrative arc of each spot. He also curated a team of primarily BIPOC creative and production partners who in turn fostered an on-set environment focused on learning and collaboration. Teens (both those featured in the spots and others from each community) were hired as production assistants on each shoot and paid market rates.
The campaign garnered:
- Primary TV placements during NBA playoffs & other highly watched programing during the month of May.
- Supporting owned channel messaging within emails, in-store signage & videos, PR stories and blog posts, Best Buy Teen Tech Center landing page, and additional banners and messages throughout the BestBuy.com site.
- Organic social posts starting in May and ran through the remainder of the year.
- Video playback in stores on customer-facing TVs.
- Integration during the Best Buy Foundation’s annual fundraising gala at the end of June.
RESULTS
The campaign in May reached over 73M impressions in broadcast, garnered 92K email clicks, 10K impressions in Instagram (organic), 9K views on YouTube with positive sentiment, and 25K landing page visits (+363% month over month). A survey revealed that 72% of consumers stated that Teen Tech Centers and concepts to more deeply integrate them into our business positively changed their perception towards Best Buy, and 35% indicated it actually increased their intent to shop with Best Buy.
CAMPAIGN GALLERY
