The GMRENCEN wanted to fill the wall space around the building with beautiful photography. As part of Franco’s social media strategy, Franco had been collecting user-generated content submissions including beautiful photography of the building from the GMRENCEN audiences on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Franco saw an opportunity to solicit photos to fill the empty wall space and worked with CBRE to develop a contest for professional and amateur photographers to showcase their work by submitting beautiful images of the GMRENCEN through social media.
Franco utilized the GMRENCEN blog to announce the contest and outline the rules, then promoted the blog post through both organic and paid social media content targeting photographers in Detroit and nearby the Renaissance Center interested in landscape photography. Each week, as new photos were submitted, Franco leveraged the weekly popular beauty shots of the building to promote more entries. A public vote helped determine the winning photos.
The digital advertising effort reached just shy of 27,000 people and earned more than 2,400 contest views. The contest received 471 photo entries and nearly 10,000 public votes. An added benefit to the contest is the winning photographers are now ambassadors of the building – they promote their published photos of the GMRENCEN on social media and bring people to the building to show off their photography work on display.
