Georgia-Pacific approached Almighty to develop a content program to help launch their YouTube channel, that wouldn't require major media production budgets or the commissioning of brand new materials. We found that they had plenty of material right in their archives that was begging to see the light of day.
Many of Georgia-Pacific's brands (Brawny, Dixie, Vanity Fair, Angel Soft) have been household names since before the digital age, and continue to be the subjects of frequent reference online and off. But not a lot of fans of Dixie bathroom cups may know (or remember) that Dixie started out making ice cream cups with collectible lids, that it was an early sponsor for the 1956 game show Queen For A Day (currently being reworked into a reality show), that the Galloping Gourmet gave his personal endorsement to the cups in a series of ads, or that legendary logo and title sequence designer Saul Bass created the Dixie Cups logo used from 1969 through the early 2000's.
Prior to GP's launching of its official YouTube channel, there were several scattered user-uploaded vintage Dixie advertisements on YouTube, but many gaps, and not nearly enough to cover the brand's history. There was no historical information or context about them, and no real curated collection all in once place. Further, if this can be considered a "conversation," GP and Dixie themselves didn't have a seat at the table.
Once we defined the nature of the program, Georgia-Pacific's challenge was twofold: first, find, discover, and make usable the best material from Dixie's in-house archives of past broadcast advertising, and second, research, annotate, and launch the collection in a way that would make it most useful to both one-off and serial viewing on YouTube. Almighty worked with GP's communications and in-house broadcast production teams to gather all of the available tapes, sat through hours of video, and then logged and organized the digitized footage into chronological and thematic order. We then researched each advertisement and the production and cultural environments in which which it was made, and developed short descriptions and annotations to go with each video. We published one video a day for just over a month, and each video became a part of the Vintage Dixie Advertising playlist on YouTube.
This project expanded the GeorgiaPacificTV content library from 4 videos to 49, and has helped improve Georgia-Pacific's and Dixie's search visibility and YouTube metrics substantially.
