Within the context of user content campaigns, ambassadors serve as featured content creators that inspire and drive user content. Although ambassadors are often commissioned in some way, they’re portrayed as having minimal professional connections with a brand so their content appears authentic, which will hopefully help users create content that seems authentic and non-forced, which will hopefully appear to those users’ audiences as having resulted from an authentic and positive brand connection, and so on.
Ambassadors are the cool people you pay to attend your party to make it seem like this is the party where all the cool people want to be, except the party is your brand hashtag. Below is an illustration of this basic flow, in which ambassadors inspire quality content from target users, which are then both served to more target users.
Below are some examples of brands using ambassadors to inspire and drive user content.
Ford Fiesta Movement
To help promote the 2014 Ford Fiesta sedan, Ford recruited 100 social content ambassadors, which were known as Fiesta agents throughout the campaign. Each agent was loaned a customized 2014 Ford Fiesta for a year (with comprehensive fuel, insurance and parking reimbursements) in exchange for completing a monthly mission, and creating a video that documented the mission.
Fiesta agent missions included staging a fake Running Of The Bulls on Venice Beach,
eating 24 marshmallows in less than 5 minutes,
and many more.
Although the Fiesta car was seldom the focus of missions, it was always clearly depicted as the adventure-enabler. It’s what brought the agents to their missions, just as it could bring American millennials to their own adventures.
Tourism Whistler
Tourism Whistler recruited professional photographers to craft photo essays on their personal connection with Whistler, British Columbia, which were published on the Tourism Whistler site. Essay topics ranged the zen of mountain silence, to the fruits of 3 years of night photography atop Whistler’s peak, to the raucous Sunday parties that take over Whistler village. Together, the essays depict an area bursting with adventure, culture and good vibes.
Below each photo essay was a gallery of user photos pulled from the #WhistlerUnfiltered hashtag, and also information about a Whistler photo contest with an all-expenses-paid vacation prize, which could be won by participating on #WhistlerUnfiltered. Thus, Whistler stirred the imagination of readers with stunning photo essays, and then challenged them to take a crack at capturing the mountain’s beauty and culture.
The user-generated content section of the site features three stories similar to the professional photo essays, in which users are interviewed about one of their #WhistlerUnfiltered photos. Like the professional essays, these three user stories and the stream of user content below depict both the adventure and culture of Whistler.
Sprite Films Challenge
To inspire and drive users to submit Sprite-inspired films to #SpriteFilmsChallenge, Sprite leveraged their student films competition, in which students from film schools created short Sprite-inspired films for the chance to win a scholarship and a larger video project with Sprite. The winning student film, What We Need, and the other student finalist films were used by Sprite in communications promoting the Sprite Films Challenge, partly to help inspire and set the desired tone for future user content on #SpriteFilmsChallenge.
The student film videos were prominently displayed on the Sprite Films Challenge page beside the submission instructions to help inspire users to create their own Sprite-inspired films.
Aside from the instructions to create a Sprite-inspired film, the content and theme of video submissions was up to the imagination of users. User content on #SpriteFilmsChallenge focused on topics such as
the calming effects of Sprite to the face,
the strengthening effects of Sprite on a balmy summer day,
Sprite playground love, and more.
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