Commentary

Global Citizen Forgoes Search Opportunity, Capitalizes On Social

'Tis the season to do good for others -- even those who are too busy during the rest of the year. We all have our own motivations for helping others, but one company in particular continues to motivate Millennials to become "do-gooders" through social interactions.

The good deed -- doing something to help humanity -- enters the do-gooder into a drawing to win concert tickets that are not available for purchase. Music fans cannot buy the tickets -- the good deed gets you in the door.

Global Citizen, the concert organizer, assigns points to those who volunteer. The points earn a space in the lottery to win tickets to the concert, which is intended to reinforce the charge to do chartable work. That work could include anything from serving meals in a soup kitchen to driving awareness to ending poverty through something as simple as a Twitter tweet or Facebook post.

Global Citizen has also seeded videos through GlassView -- a marketplace for brands and publishers to drive social engagement -- to promote the cause on social sites, but in my opinion missed an opportunity to promote the event through search campaigns that could have locked on to keywords connected to "holidays" and "thanksgiving" or "chicken recipes."

As much as social seems to work for the organization, connecting their campaigns with search advertising could do so much more.

Still, Andrew Kirk, global communications director at Global Citizen, says about 8 million members have joined in to amplify the organization's work aimed at ending extreme poverty by 2030.

Don't discount social, however. The latest campaign supported by GlassView that led up to the 2016 Festival in September featuring the musical artist Rihanna and others generated more than 1.3 million social actions. These actions led to 44 new commitments and announcements worth more than $1.9 billion. These commitments had the opportunity to reach more than over 199 million people. This was the fifth annual Global Citizen Festival, a movement founded in 2012.  

Meanwhile, GlassView shared two stats for the campaign. The overall click-through rate and completion rate for both the NYC and Montreal ads included CTRs of 2.48-times above the industry benchmark, and video completion rate of 85.2% above the industry benchmark.

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