Target spreads brand love through Vine

Creativity, fun and design are at the heart of the Target brand. Target Creative, the company’s in-house team, features a diverse group of art directors, designers, writers and producers who serve as brand experts. This internal agency gives Target the ability to move quickly and innovate from within the company across nearly every channel, including signage, packaging, print and digital.

Case in point: After launching a Vine account in July, the Target Creative team was inspired to create shareable content and compelling storytelling via this new six-second looping video format.

“Constraints are often the best fuel for creativity,” said Todd Waterbury, Target’s senior vice president of creative. “I love the challenge Vine’s six seconds pose to us as designers and storytellers. Brevity can be beautiful.”

Target’s creative process on Vine

For Todd’s team, a new campaign is only truly successful if it resonates with its target audiences. They develop Vine videos by answering three key questions:

● Is it timely? Target wants to ensure that Vine videos align with what people are talking about or care about most at a given moment. To kick off the football season, for example, Target had some fun with game day munchies.

● Does it fit the brand voice? Target aims to create experiences that feel optimistic, inclusive and surprising.

● Is it true to the Vine community? Of course, a brand wants to be true to itself, but Target also wants to develop content that feels authentic to the medium at hand.

Most of Target Creative’s Vine videos take at least 2 to 3 weeks to produce from concept to execution. To keep things on track and create a messaging cadence, the team relies heavily on an editorial calendar, and aims to post at least one Vine video per week.

Test, learn and engage

Thanks to the recent update to Vine that allows for drafting and editing, the team can test several techniques before posting. Some personal favorites have emerged as the most popular content with fans too. For instance, this playful Lite Brite video took 10 people to produce and two weeks to prepare.

Target Creative used Vine’s continuous loop function to create this endless roller coaster ride.

And this one illustrates how Target can make a summer day more enjoyable, as it takes advantage of the platform’s “touch-to-pause” feature.

 A more recent production helped followers get into the Halloween spirit with a fun play on pumpkins:

Extending reach in store and beyond

Eight CityTarget locations have a digital welcome wall that greets guests as they enter the store. In addition to communicating weekly promotions and local information, they also offer the perfect place to showcase the most recent Vine videos. The company has seen positive feedback from guests who tweeted about their enjoyment of the videos.

To gauge success initially, Target is measuring engagement on Vine, but number of followers is another indication of how well the testing has gone: they have nearly doubled their Vine followers within a few months. Better yet, Vine has given Target Creative a new channel with which to experiment and develop content that connects with guests in ways that weren’t previously possible.

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Check out the new Vine Mini Festival, weekly motivation to create a short masterpiece and share it with the Vine community.