Whether it’s chasing a dream in the backcountry, or chasing your children in the park, anyone who pursues their true passions and lives their lives to the fullest is a Hero (Morten.) GoPro’s “There’s a Hero in All of Us” campaign combined both digital and traditional media to convey a common message. They achieved success in doing so by utilizing numerous platforms as their medium of communication. The inspiration for the campaign was derived from GoPro’s own team of talented influencers, content creators, and athletes alongside agency Mediabrands in San Francisco (GoPro.) “There’s a Hero in All of Us” was created to inspire everyone to live a full life and find new ways to capture and share their experiences using GoPro’s expanding ecosystem of cameras, accessories, mounts and software (Morten.)
An abundance of creativity and planning helped contribute to the success of this campaign. AdWeek gave recognition to GoPro in the category of “Best Use of Programmatic” (GoPro.) They commended the campaign for resonating across 14 different countries, and nine different languages (GoPro.) The campaign was created to market a product that could be used to capture priceless family moments, as well as travel to the depths of the ocean to document one’s journey (GoPro.) GoPro wanted to rouse people’s passion for taking pictures, and doing so became quite complex when examining the varied interests of it’s wide target audience (Staff & Adweek Staff, 2017.) For the online component of the campaign, GoPro and Mediabrands analyzed research on what consumers in each specific country liked to photograph, they built out the campaign with 1,600 pieces of addressable content (Staff & Adweek Staff, 2017.) GoPro’s Global Advertising Manager, Sacha Coates stated, “Not only were we trying to find imagery that spoke to each of the audiences that we were targeting, we were also trying to highlight the product attributes of our HERO5 camera” (GoPro.) The campaign resulted in over 153 million impressions (Staff & Adweek Staff, 2017.) GoPro earned nearly $7 in return for every dollar spent on advertising (Staff & Adweek Staff, 2017.) These results came as a surprise to J.P. Aguirre, EVP Managing Director and Global Managing Partner at UM San Francisco, “The actual intent of this work was more prospecting, trying to drive people down the purchase funnel. It wasn’t intended to drive immediate sales,” (Staff & Adweek Staff, 2017.)
GoPro’s messaging aimed to inspire users to “Be a Hero” by documenting their own journey using the Hero5. They achieved reaching a multitude of different target audiences through use of both digital and traditional media. In additional to the powerful user-driven content and earned media exploding on their digital platforms, they used a variety of outdoor ads, brand-related sponsorships, and even a firefighters original video in order to successfully reach this wide target audience with varied interests (Starr, 2017.)
GoPro’s “There’s a Hero in All of Us,” celebrates the extraordinary in everyday life (GoPro.) Although this is how the campaign was described by GoPro, the campaign’s imagery tells quite a different story. Ad images of extreme sports and amazing travel destinations, although interesting to view, tend to align more so with the brand’s adrenaline-junkie roots. There is not a great deal I would recommend changing about the existing campaign, it was notably successful in its original form. Integrating a mix of digital and traditional media would still be an excellent way to reach a wide target audience with varied interests. There are some suggestions I would have for future campaign strategies. Utilizing the user-driven content approach could continue to be prosperous if the messaging were adjusted. GoPro should encourage users to share images of what is important to and closely resonates with them on a personal level. I would propose adjusting their messaging and content strategy to move toward featuring images a consumer may identify with on a day-to-day basis. Content and images centered around graduations, birthday parties, weddings, events, friends and family, may help consumers understand that they don’t necessarily need to be jumping out of a plane to utilize and make GoPro cameras a part of their everyday lives.
Stephanie Milak 
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