What was the challenge?
How do you facilitate sex education in the digital age and engage Māori youth in a fun and educational way, while normalising talking about sex to engage our rangatahi?
Māori Media Production company Arataua partnered with Mosh to help promote their ‘Ai’ (Te Reo for ‘sex’) educational series via social media.
Over the course of eight weeks, fourteen long-format episodes were posted on Instagram, with short snippets posted on TikTok. The objective was to build conversation and awareness and break the stigma around sexual health – specifically STDs and STIs.
With a target audience of Māori and Pasifika young adults between 18 and 24 and their parents, they are a difficult audience to engage at the best of times, but especially when it involves talking openly about what is culturally a taboo topic.
What was our strategy?
To keep the audience engaged, Mosh helped craft interactive Stories, posts, and giveaways in between each episode. We also ran Q&As on the Instagram Story with the Ai sex expert and ‘day in the life’ videos with the hosts of Ai. This created conversations with the audience which allowed them to ask questions and have them answered anonymously.
Using the Ai episodes, small, entertaining, and educational snippets were created to post on TikTok – as we know that the majority of our target audience is younger and are heavy users of the app.
We posted two posts a week over the eight weeks, and with a strategic targeting plan, we were able to gather almost 5,000 followers across all platforms in that same amount of time. The videos were engaging and interesting and received thousands of views with the best-performing video receiving 116k views. The TikTok account was used to link that platform’s younger audience to Instagram through calls to action to head to the Ai Instagram to watch the full episodes. This was a great way to leverage the short-form videos to capture the younger audience’s attention and encourage them to go watch the full episodes.
Creating a unique look
To support the episodes provided to Mosh, we crafted a very specific visual style and aesthetic for Ai that continued across Instagram for the duration of the campaign. This was not part of the brief but since the younger generation is enthusiastic about aesthetics, we knew the design would play a big part in catching our audience’s eye.
What were the results?
The first Ai episode had over 15,000 views, 428 shares, and 261 saves. The momentum continued for the rest of the campaign with each episode having thousands of views.
The campaign ran over eight weeks and the Ai Instagram account had not only gained 2,000 followers before the first episode launched, but it also had over 3,000 followers by the end of the campaign, just on Instagram alone. The first Ai episode had over 15,000 views, 428 shares, and 261 saves. The momentum continued for the rest of the campaign with each episode having thousands of views. Over the eight weeks, we reached 1,164,459 people and gained 587,187 video views across all of our episodes and other video content.
The results of this campaign showed that our rangatahi really needed this conversation and that with the right creative approach, and a strong strategy for targeting and building brand awareness, social media can be a powerful tool for educating our young people on important topics.