This summer saw unlikely style heroes The Minions, take the fashion world by storm. With a Vogue cover under their belts and a fashion line at Selfridges, Stylight decided to take their fashion credentials to the next level by turning the fashion elite into the quirky yellow creatures.
In a nutshell, The Minionistas was our most successful content marketing campaign to date with a reach of 80 million and features across over 700 websites. Now, three months later – and with a wealth of Minion knowledge behind us, we are excited to share the results and story behind this humorous campaign.
The release of the campaign, dubbed The Minionistas, (Minions + fashionistas combined… duh!) came at the perfect time as the Minions movie had been released internationally and was an instant box office hit. Our goal was to both have The Minionistas featured in a variety of top online publications, as well as generate significant social media buzz so we knew we wanted to keep the designs bold, eye catching and most importantly, comical!
The Stylight content team initially selected 9 icons from the fashion world including the likes of Alexa Chung, Marc Jacobs, Jean Paul Gaultier, Cara Delevingne, Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld. We aimed to choose fashionistas who had an instantly recognisable style and we really sought to emphasize their distinguishable features in their Minion counterparts.
What happened next?
Conversation was instantly sparked with influential trend forecasting website WGSN who loved the Minionistas. This really leveraged the campaign and helped us get a foot in the door globally. Subsequently online menswear and editorial site Hypebeast featured them on their Instagram account and quickly generated 33,000 likes and instantly sparked the use of ‘#minionistas’ across both Instagram and Twitter.
Within a week the Minionistas were breaking the internet and had been featured in a range of global high profile publications including Forbes, Vogue, Paper Magazine, Bild, Evening Standard, Grazia and WhoWhatWear. Even Marc Jacobs and Choupette shared them to millions of their loyal followers. In total we were featured across 700+ websites including 11 Elle regions and 5 Cosmopolitan regions.
It quickly became clear that both social users and journalists wanted more.
With requests coming in thick and fast we created our follow up campaign ‘Minionistas #2’ featuring the likes of Iris Apfel and Victoria Beckham. Beckham herself actually Tweeted and Instagrammed a picture of her Minionista which led to magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Elle and Paper Magazine picking up the campaign and organically linking to Stylight. In addition to this we also created ‘Minionistas: Blogger Edition’ featuring top blogger talent such as Garance Dore and Chiara Ferragni. Our inclusion of iconic menswear blogger Bryan Boy lead to further influential social coverage from his personal accounts.
To date The Minionistas were featured in 54 countries worldwide and reach was over 80 million.
The Minionistas demonstrated the power of simple storytelling as well as the use of a relevant, easily accessible idea. The Minions appeal to a huge audience and this was interestingly an almost even split between males and females.
The total reach of the campaign by the start of October was +80 million with 47+ million social media impressions. On Instagram the hashtag ‘minionistas’ was used 400+ times and ‘fashion minions’ 760+ times.
When a virtual content becomes…reality!
And even now, three months later, it is still as popular as ever. In fact, our audience is also continuing to develop the campaign themselves, taking it to another level by creating quizzes, t-shirts purses and notebooks emblazoned with our designs.
And budget spent? A mere €150 on thank you doughnuts and cinema tickets for the team to see the Minions movie!
Tank Yu* for sharing our Minionistas!
*(Minion language for thank you)
|By Sian O’Flaherty|
