Objective

Moby’s Silver Anniversary 

How BrainPOP turned an April Fool’s joke into a transformative, emotional brand campaign.

For BrainPOP’s 25th (“silver”) anniversary, we broke the traditional rules of brand and launched a social media campaign that took the edtech industry by storm.

By playing with our brand’s most valuable IP, a beloved orange robot named Moby, and embracing our 25-year legacy, we created a year-long campaign of brand love, nostalgia, and learning celebrations that reached over 22.8 million people organically.

Strategy

April Fools Day can be hard to hack. But with a simple idea, we turned it into a huge moment for authentic brand engagement. BrainPOP has been a learning icon for 25 years, but in edtech, that kind of legacy can turn into a real lag, real quick. Rather than shy away from our age, we leaned in. We risked it all by playing with our most valuable brand IP: our loveable, bright orange robot, Moby.

On April Fools Day (our official birthday!), we announced that Moby would be changing his recognizable orange color to silver, to celebrate our silver anniversary. 

In less that 48 hours we reached over 15M people, with thousands sharing comments of shock and pure brand love.

However, we we're just getting started! Turning Moby silver grabbed attention. We then turned the attention to our most important partners: educators!

2 days after our April Fools Day hook, we launched our inaugural Moby Awards: Class of the Year Contest, where teachers shared stories of their proudest classroom accomplishments for a chance to win.

Our contest landing page attracted over 61K unique visitors. We heard from teachers all over the world, receiving 1,500+ entries, and leveraged that content to fuel our strategy for the rest of the year.

Not every social campaign creates this kind of emotional response. All across our community, stories of how BrainPOP impacted learning poured in–fueling our social posts, blog articles, podcast interviews, email content, and so much more! And it was all captured in a story hub to drive deeper engagement for years to come. View Moby's Silver Anniversary Story Hub

Results

Writing the new rules of social media in edtech

What made this campaign so unique? It wasn’t the rules we followed, but the ones we playfully broke. As a result:

• We created an April Fools Day joke that was authentic, fun, and created more conversation than any other brand in our industry.
• We risked “best practices” and used our brand IP to grab attention and turn the tables to celebrate our teachers and their work.
• We used legacy to our benefit and wrote our own rules on how nostalgia can drive authentic engagement.
• We transformed heartfelt storytelling into timeless content to be enjoyed for years to come.

With engagement rates 3 times higher than industry average, we proved that just because memorable brand engagement in edtech is uncommon, it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

🏆 Campaign results 🏆

Reach:
Social Media: 18.7M
Website: 90K
Email: 4M
Search: 22K
Total: 22.8M

Performance: 
Social Engagements: 1.3M
Social Engagement Rate: 7.1% (3X edtech industry average)
Viral posts: 5*
Video Views: 9.5M
Average Email Open Rate: 31.48%
Average Email CTOR: 9.13%

*BrainPOP’s viral threshold in 2024:
Instagram: 500K reach, 50K engagements
Twitter/X: 100K reach, 10K engagements

Growth: 
Social Audience: +101K
Contest Submissions: 1,560
Emails Collected: 1K

Media