Our guest on the Lost In Found podcast this week is Patrick Holly, Executive Creative Director at Upwork. Upwork calls itself the world’s work marketplace. At its core, Upwork is a community of freelancers for hire. Developers, creatives, designers - even finance and accounting people. Together, these independent professionals earned over $3.3 billion on Upwork in 2021.

Patrick’s team just launched a new campaign featuring a zombie CEO who comes back from the grave to tell us that the old way of working is gone. It’s a funny and shocking way to get the attention of hiring managers and getting them to consider hiring freelance help from Upwork.

This episode is all about audience co-creation. During the pandemic, Patrick’s team took a throwaway social media post for international coffee day and turned it into something way more useful. They created their own coffee brand and hired some illustrators and type designers directly from the Upwork platform to design the logo and illustrate the bags. The bags also contained a QR code that allowed the recipients (hiring managers) to hire the designers immediately. The gift delighted clients and helped create real value for Upwork’s members. They even made a film about it.

Everything Upwork does is in service of its audience. They found a stat about how moms weren’t returning to the workforce at the same rate as everyone else, so they made a film that espoused all the skills moms inherently have. It started as a scripted production. But Patrick decided to use Found Content instead. Catch+Release helped curate and license all the user-generated shots. You can see this beautiful spot here.

Also, if you want to stay cool, check out the DEMO Fesitval (Patrick explains it in the episode).

Want to co-create with your audience? If you see a post from a customer that you think you might want to use in your campaign, just grab the url and drop it into the licensing tool at Catchandrelease.com. You’ll get a downloadable file of the image, movie or audio clip. And our licensing experts will handle all the outreach and negotiation, including all the lawyer-y stuff like indemnifications. Join the Found Content revolution and see how real your advertising can get. License the internet at catchandrelease.com

Thanks to Patrick Holly for spending some time with us. Lost In Found is a production of Catch+Release. Editor: Charlie Cusumano.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit catchandrelease.substack.com