How Teleflora's Mother's Day Spot Hit the Mark with UGC

It was late summer. Danielle Mason, Vice President of Marketing at Teleflora, was already thinking about Mother’s Day. She was getting ready to brief her in-house agency in December, giving them ample time to develop and execute this important campaign. And the back-to-school season sparked an idea: The hardest part of motherhood isn’t the day-to-day mess and stress, the hardest part is letting them go so they can grow.

“It’s something that moms feel all the time because we want to raise children who will be independent and thrive in the world, and yet releasing them feels impossible,” Mason told Adweek. “It’s a human truth that we thought advertising hadn’t touched on before.”

In order to write the brief, Danielle was looking for inspiration from real people. She searched “first day of school” on YouTube because, as a mom herself, she knew how emotional that day can be. She wanted to see what a mother looked like after taking her child to the school bus stop for the first time and waving goodbye. What she found was a user-generated video that sparked inspiration and turned into, “A Teleflora Love Story: The Hardest Part.”

At the end of the short video, shot on a smartphone, we see the bus in the distance as the mom turns toward the camera, covering the lens to hide the fact that her eyes are filled with tears. The authenticity and emotion of the video is impossible not to feel. Danielle knew it was the perfect starting point for a meaningful campaign and the exact feeling she wanted her in-house creative team to capture when they shot Teleflora’s 2023 Mother’s Day spot.

You Can't Manufacture Human Emotion

The team worked for weeks on scripts and concepts for a scripted spot, but they kept coming back to the emotion and power of the UGC “Bus Mom” video. That’s when the team made the decision to start gathering similar UGC videos that aligned with the campaign brief. Connecting with IP owners can be challenging and oftentimes very time consuming, so that’s when the team decided to tap into the experts.

Tanya LeSieur, global director of integrated production at The Wonderful Company, Teleflora’s parent company, recommended Catch+Release. She had used the platform to clear and license UGC and Content in the past.

Margaret Keene, chief creative officer at The Wonderful Company, worked closely with Mason from the onset. Our goal was to tug at the heartstrings and really capture those emotional moments as children grow and your role as a mother shifts, something a lot of people don’t talk about. It’s an emotional journey for so many reasons, but it’s also the most rewarding.

“The team edited a number of clips they found during curation, always looking for the nuggets that would tell the story and expose the raw, beautiful emotions of letting go, and letting your children grow,” added LeSieur.

“Catch+Release is a catch-all for capturing culture. It’s a new way of manifesting ideas, and creating a cohesive storyline incorporating many different viewpoints. We spend a lot of time on social media, and this is a new and unique way of leveraging UGC that exists," said Keene. “As someone in the creative space, this type of content is really raw and authentic - humans are fascinating, the content exists and we as creatives have the unique ability to shape a great story.”

“You hear the background sounds of the hospital, the screams of a little child, it’s all very real. It brings you back to those milestones and moments in your own motherhood journey." — Danielle Mason, Vice President of Marketing at Teleflora

Grab Some Kleenex

With Catch+Release curating and contacting IP owners, the Teleflora team was able to focus on the finer points of the campaign, along with PR and marketing strategies. Diversity was an important component of the campaign - the team wanted to show a variety of moms and moments in a mom’s life when she must let go.

The result – an ad spot that is truly a tearjerker and something every mom can resonate with.

“Watching the spot it felt very real, and very triggering,” says Mason. “You hear the background sounds of the hospital, the screams of a little child, it’s all very real. It brings you back to those milestones and moments in your own motherhood journey. We are thrilled to have a diverse representation of moms in the spot and to have captured such an array of milestones that are highly emotional – all the moms at The Wonderful Company and Teleflora resonated with a different clip, and we hope that all the moms out there feel the same.”

Delivering Goosebumps and Hitting the Mark

Does it work? All signs point to yes. The campaign has been featured in marketing industry publications like Adweek, AdAge, MediaPost, and The Drum as an early Mother’s Day favorite.

“We’re measuring the success of the spot against PR goals,” says Mason. “We’re also playing with shorter clips of the spot on TikTok to see if certain scenes perform better than others. We will look at sales and internally run an ROI against that.”

The spot received 7.2M YouTube views in just 10 days. We’d say it ‘hit the mark.’

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7.2M YouTube viewed in just 10 days