Category: Best use or integration of user-generated content
Advertiser: UNILEVER
Product/Service: AXE EXCITE BODYSPRAY
Agency: DOKYO
Agency: MINDSHARE
Agency: MARKENFILM CROSSING
Managing Partner/Chief Creative Officer: Frank Berning (Dokyo)
Executive Creative Director: Gerrit Asmus (Dokyo)
Management Supervisor: Christian Leihner (Dokyo)
Project Manager: Yves Zeh (Dokyo)
Creative Director: Sönke Busch (Dokyo)
Text: Anemone Zeim (Dokyo)
Text: Arndt Lettmann (Dokyo)
Text: Chris Knipping (Dokyo)
Text: Jessica Hoppe (Dokyo)
Text: Rudolf Rüssmann (Dokyo)
Text: Jochen Sendel (Dokyo)
Producer: Christine-Marie Gardeweg (Markenfilm Crossing)
Director: Tibor Glage (Markenfilm Crossing)
Camera: Sten Mende (Markenfilm Crossing)
Grouphead Media Planning: Oliver Linge (Mindshare)
Project Manager Online: Sven Springer (La Red)
Creative Director Online: Margit Schröder (La Red)
Invention: Kai Loeser (Mindshare)
Flash/Flex Developer: Gregory Jacobs (La Red)
Concept Online: Tobias Wortmann (La Red)
Media placement: Film - Online - 01-24 December 2011
Campaign Description
Branded Entertainment, castigated in the past as advertorial, sell-o-vision or even clandestine advertising, lost much of its legal stigma in Germany with a revision to the national broadcasting charter (Rundfunkvertrag) in 2010.
Simultaneously, media consumption patterns in our market increasingly shifted online.
Our typical AXE target spends more than 2 hours a day surfing the internet – longer than he spends in front of the TV.
This development is now reflected in Branded Entertainment, which is appearing with increasing regularity on the internet in video/moving picture form, eg. as WebTV on the highest-reach online platforms (e.g. Musicmix on Tape.tv, time4fashion on yahoo, web soap Nigel & Victoria on Youtube).
Effectiveness
In January 2011, AXE successfully launched Excite, a new body spray variant, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The core communication idea is that Excite is so irresistible, even angels will fall for it.
In December 2011, to maintain the sales success, we extended the established ‘angel’ communication concept, and dovetailed it with the approach of Christmas, we developed the ‘AXE Excite Advent Calendar’ - the most successful digital AXE campaign so far.
Our challenge: How can we create an advent calendar guys make a point of viewing every single day right through to Christmas?
The idea: We transformed this everyday classic into an interactive platform, the AXE Digital Advent Calendar. This time, guys got to pick a subject for a sexy film starring a sweet AXE angel and the next morning, every morning, we surprised them with a hot new clip.
Every day, from December 1 until Christmas Eve, we responded to the guys by interpreting and filming the idea, with the most votes, in a funny and sexy AXE-branded video.
Implementation
An initial awareness-building phase used a 360-degree media campaign with a 7' TV tag, Citylights, PR features and online banners. After that, we focused on homepage takeovers on YouTube and MSN. We then created a wide variety of rich media banners and launched a major media partnership with Bild.de, Germanys biggest newspaper, where our target group interacted directly with the advent calendar. The high level of interactivity was fundamentally driven by users themselves: users who suggested gift ideas then canvassed votes from their friends, causing the campaign and our content to spread virally.
Outcome
Distributing our content on multiple platforms and integrating sharing mechanisms for the films were key to maximising the campaign reach.
During the 6-week campaign phase, we received more than 8m content views, 140,800 users who voted and 18,795 users who suggested gift ideas. More than 51,000 users shared the ideas on social media networks. The campaign attracted nearly 30,000 new fans on Facebook. Through PR featuring, we achieved over 150m contacts within the target group.
Thanks to a TV and digital activation campaign, the product variant became the third strongest in the entire AXE deodorant range. We thus reached our ambitious goal of creating a social phenomenon among the target group and turning AXE consumers into fans.