Despite any personal opinions or feelings viewers may have about Gillette’s ad, this controversy has certainly worked wonders in terms of generating views and engagement for the clip across social video platforms. Twitter Provides a Conversation Outlet for “We Believe” Gillette’s distribution strategy for its “We Believe” ad was as typical as any company’s might be — take the 30-second and one-minute-30-second versions of the ad, and post both to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. However, the results of this strategy were very untypical; not only did the longer versions of the ad gain the most views across all three platforms, but the ad uploaded to Twitter pulled in the most overall views by far. Compare this to 7 million on YouTube for the same time period, and just over 3.2 million on Facebook. To date, Gillette’s ad has pulled in 27.2 million views on Twitter, 19.8 million on YouTube, and 7.2 million on Facebook. Those 184 videos have generated around 10 million views to date, but “We Believe” reached 2.4x those views in under three days! #TheBestMenCanBe pic.twitter.com/hhBL1XjFVo — Gillette (@Gillette) January 14, 2019 In a world where Facebook and YouTube claim the majority of online video views (as proven by the billions of views every month we see on the leaderboards), these stats should make all brands take note: Twitter is not a social video platform to overlook. Essentially, viewers of Gillette’s newest ad have clearly chosen Twitter and YouTube as the primary platforms for viewing and interacting with the spot. For reference, Justin Bieber’s “Baby” (which held the unfortunate title of the most-disliked video on YouTube for 8 years until December 2018) has a dislike-to-like ratio of 48.94%; compare that to 66.45% for Gillette and you can start to understand the level of negative sentiment surrounding its newest ad. Additionally, when we looked at Gillette’s engagement rates from the last three years on Twitter, the brand has obviously reached far more people than ever before; Gillette claimed almost 43K total engagements over the last three years not counting “We Believe,” but hit 753K engagements on Twitter in just two days, a comparative reach of 1766%!
Gillette stirred up a lot of controversy last week with the release of its newest ad “We Believe.” In a nutshell, the spot took the razor brand’s 30-year-old slogan of “the best a man can get” and changed it to “the best men can be,” challenging “traditional”-yet-toxic ideas of masculinity (such as men ogling women or bullies chasing a young man) and encouraging viewers to set good examples for future generations of boys.
Despite any personal opinions or feelings viewers may have about Gillette’s ad, this controversy has certainly worked wonders in terms of generating views and engagement for the clip across social video platforms. Let’s take a look at how it’s performing so far, starting with the platform where the ad really took off — Twitter.
Twitter Provides a Conversation Outlet for “We Believe”
Gillette’s distribution strategy for its “We Believe” ad was as typical as any company’s might be — take the 30-second and one-minute-30-second versions of the ad, and post both to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. However, the results of this strategy were very untypical; not only did the longer versions of the ad gain the most views across all three platforms, but the ad uploaded to Twitter pulled in the most overall views by far. Within one day of going live on the tweeting platform, the 1:30 cut of the “We Believe” ad generated more than 13 million views! Compare this to 7 million on YouTube for the same time period, and just over 3.2 million on Facebook. To date, Gillette’s ad has pulled in 27.2 million views on Twitter, 19.8 million on YouTube, and 7.2 million on Facebook.
While Gillette has used Twitter as part of its social media strategy before, it’s never seen this amount of success with video on that platform. To put the numbers above into greater perspective, consider that over the last three years, Gillette has posted 184 videos to Twitter, and the brand has used the platform as its main video distribution outlet ahead of Facebook and YouTube, respectively. Those 184 videos have generated around 10 million views to date, but “We Believe” reached 2.4x those views in under three days!
“Boys will be boys”? Isn’t it time we stopped excusing bad behavior? Re-think and take action by joining us at https://t.co/giHuGDEvlT. #TheBestMenCanBe pic.twitter.com/hhBL1XjFVo
— Gillette (@Gillette) January 14, 2019
In a world where Facebook and YouTube claim the majority of online video views (as proven by the billions of views every month we see on the leaderboards), these…
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