Oxford Bibliographies Digital Campaign

Winner! 2013 Internet Advertising Awards Best Publishing Online Campaign. Read more

In addition to publishing over 4,600 new books each year, Oxford University Press maintains a premier position as a provider of online information to libraries and individuals worldwide. Oxford's global product marketing team aims to spread awareness and enthusiasm for these online resources by creating innovative promotional campaigns that speak to Oxford's trusted history as well as its future.

One of Oxford's premier online products, Oxford Bibliographies, offers exclusive, authoritative research guides, combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia.

Oxford Bibliographies is a cutting-edge research tool for students and faculty alike. By featuring students and faculty from across the academic spectrum and having them speak directly about how they use Oxford Bibliographies for their own work and in the classroom, this campaign presented Oxford Bibliographies to the customer in a conversational, concise, and relatable way. These videos aimed to demonstrate specifically how Oxford Bibliographies can benefit the researchers of today and overall, the goal was to show both current potential users that Oxford Bibliographies is the solution to the ever-growing problem of unreliable information overload in today’s online research process.

Read more about the creation of Oxford Bibliographies and its unique features and benefits

User Focused Videos

Facebook Campaign

After the videos were created, Oxford Academic posted links to them on Facebook. In a single day, over 33,000 people viewed each post:

Each post was targeted and promoted to appear on users' facebook newsfeed with the goal of awareness and "click-throughs" to the Oxford Bibliographies site. As a result of these two videos, which have been collectively viewed over 16,000 times, December usage of Oxford Bibliographies increase by 30% compared to the same month in 2011.

In addition to the impressive amount of people who saw the video each post also had over 200 "Likes" and over 70 "shares" which allowed Facebook users who may not be "Fans" of the Oxford Academic page to gain exposure to Oxford Bibliographies and to engage with it online in some way.

Twitter Campaign

In addition to a Facebook campaign, Oxford Academic posted links to each video on Twitter:

Each tweet had an average click-through rate of over 3% compared to a normal Twitter click-through of 1%. While the Facebook posts attracted the social media activity of more students, the Twitter posts attracted more activity from faculty and researchers, showing a clear divide between the types of social media being used across academic communities.