SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN | JAMES RIVER AIR FOR ARTOBER

How do you tie in an air conditioning company to an arts advocacy and education campaign? You find the right partner. James River Air Conditioning has always been a supporter of the arts, and we wanted a creative way to showcase that as Richmond celebrated “Artober,” a month highlighting arts and culture in our community. Meanwhile, local cartoonist “RVA Coffee Stain” has been made famous in-part from his random-act-of-kindness “Art Abandonment” campaigns. We wanted a fun and interactive way to celebrate the month, not another “We support the arts” post in our social feed. It was a perfect collaboration.

Our usual approach to social targets homeowners within our footprint. We knew that partnering with “Richmond-famous” RVA Coffee Stain would expose us to an untapped audience. It was the perfect supplement to our existing social strategy.

RVA Coffee Stain had a formula for a successful art abandonment campaigns from experience. We leveraged his knowledge and brainstormed ways to tie-in the James River Air brand in a way that made sense for RVA Coffee Stain and would be fun for our fans too. We planned a weekend day for the abandonments and settled on four prints total - enough to gain traction but not too many to make people lose interest and quit following along.

People who find RVA Coffee Stain’s abandoned art are excited to have just the print, but our sweetened package of gift cards, cell phone fans and other small gifts made it that much more enticing. RVA Coffee Stain set out on a Saturday to hide the prints throughout the city, dropping clues to their location as he went on Twitter.

Prints didn’t last longer than an hour each before they were spotted on Twitter and tracked down by RVA Coffee Stain fans. Some lucky finders even sent us photos of their loot for us to repost and share.