Inside Away’s new ‘programming’ strategy for social media

The more you scroll, the more likely it is that you’ll come across a branded social series. Count luggage brand Away as another among them.

With its new social series, Actually Away, the brand, which was a darling of the late 2010s DTC boom and has revamped its approach after facing business challenges in 2019, is aiming to create a new destination for travel stories told over multiple episodes and designed to hook the viewer in as a typical TV series would, according to Quynh Dang, Away’s VP of brand.

For Actually Away’s first season, which has six episodes so far, two travelers cross paths at New York City’s Grand Central Station, connecting as they await a dead phone in need of a charge and delayed trains. The plot was inspired by a real travel story, according to the company, and the it plans to draw inspiration from customers’ travel stories for the series.

As consumer behavior shifts and social transforms into “the new TV,” Away is looking to regularly show up where people are spending their time with “a seven- to eight-episode storyline that is compelling” enough to “pull people away from a scrolling” and “replacing it with what they might have digested in terms of media on TV and streaming,” Dang told us.

This particular story is one that is probably familiar enough for audiences to relate to it—just about everyone has dealt with travel woes, and just about everyone hopes to meet someone special. There are additional elements that aim to add enough mystery to the plot to keep audiences interested enough to tune back in, Dang said.

Tuning in

Early numbers are promising. “First week out, our engagements were up over 125%, our views up over 58%, our engagement [was] up over 43%, so already our hypothesis of investing in this type of content, raising our baseline for all metrics on organic social, is already proving to be true,” Dang said.

She is hopeful that the figures increase the trend line across all of the brand’s content so “that when we introduce significant moments in product, campaigns, or stories we want to tell, that we’ve grown and expanded who is getting to see that content.”

In the case of Actually Away, the brand is tracking organic and earned media for the series to understand what genuine audience interest is across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

“When you have strong brand storytelling, when you have strong brand activations and moments, it lifts all boats,” Dang said. “We’ll continue to monitor and see if that proves to be true and whether or not we have to augment the strategy with any paid [media], but for right now it’s organic.”

Inside job

The series is part of a broader strategy shift for Away. Rather than thinking about posts in a vacuum, the team is taking a “programming” approach to social, Dang said, with the thinking that more engaging series may generate the types of views and engagement the brand is looking for.

Away’s in-house team is behind the effort, with Senior Director of Social Cayla DeRegis developing scripts based on true stories. That said, the team did work with an external production partner, Michael Gaston, to pull together the effort.

The response to the series will help determine whether the brand will eventually scale its in-house operation. “As we explore how this goes and how this grows into the future, we can figure out different avenues of production,” Dang said. “But for right now, it was a labor of love.”

That said, the interest in the series so far has generated interest in involvement from the creative community, Dang said—another promising sign.

“Since we launched we’ve gotten a lot of inbounds from production people and creatives who want to participate in this project,” she said. “[It’s a] different aspect to the crowdsourcing aspect of the strategy. The whole goal was to really mine the stories from the community up, and now we’re seeing that can include creatives, can include producers and writers as well.”