While traveling through India, Africa and Southeast Asia, GE Healthcare’s president of sustainable healthcare solutions, Terri Bresenham, wanted to bring awareness and empower the work that women were doing to bring healthcare to their communities.
So, she and her team worked to create a 30-minute documentary called Heroines of Health that tells the story of three such women with an intriguing distribution plan—each day the brand is posting a one-minute clip to Instagram that tells a new part of the story. Over the course of one month, the entire film will live on a dedicated Instagram account. Lisa Russell worked with GE on the film.
“My team knew the 30-minute format would work well for live screenings, but for social we had to ask ourselves: How do we distribute this content in a way that is native to these platforms and reflects the way our audiences consume content today?” said Sarah Wills, chief communications officer at GE Healthcare. “We know video consumption, particularly on mobile, is increasing and we feel strongly that the documentary content—whether as a full film or in a one-minute clip—is compelling enough that it would speak for itself regardless, so we went for it.”
Wills added that the campaign is the first time the brand has tried pushing out a social-first documentary and it picked Instagram because the content works for both linear and non-linear viewing and is geared towards audiences outside of the United States.
“If a viewer sees just a handful of the key clips in his or her feed, this can achieve our goals, especially for viewers who are less likely to watch longer content. Knowing that many viewers consume video without audio, we were also able to use the text of each Instagram post as a kind of creative subtitle, giving the viewer a quick and easily consumable sense of what was happening in the clip or a quote from one of the women featured.”
Later this month, the full half-hour of footage will launch on Facebook and the brand is also promoting the initiative on Twitter.
One week into launching the campaign, the videos had more than 250,000 views, 80,000 likes and 400 bookmarks—the feature that lets users save posts to their account.
Check out the first part of the series below.
