H&M: Becoming Beckham

Credits & Description:

H&M, Becoming Beckham, made for adam&eveDDB by Sonny London, directed by Fredrik Bond.
Agency: Adam&eveddb London, United Kingdom
Client: H&M
Entrant: Adam&Eveddb London, United Kingdom
Title: Becoming Beckham
Product/Service: H&M
Idea Creation: Adam&Eveddb London, United Kingdom
Production: Sonny London, United Kingdom
Additional Company: Marshall Street Editors London, United Kingdom
Additional Company 2: Factory London, United Kingdom
Additional Company 3: Mpc Ccreative London, United Kingdom
Chief Creative Officer: Ben Priest (adam&eveDDB)
Executive Creative Director: Ben Tollett (adam&eveDDB)
Executive Creative Director: Richard Brim (adam&eveDDB)
Creative Director: Patrick McClelland (adam&eveDDB)
Managing Director: Tammy Einav (adam&eveDDB)
Account Director: James Rowe (adam&eveDDB)
Creative Director: Erik Zetterberg (H&M)
Head of Marketing: Daniel Herrmann (H&M)
Project Manager: Fia Ingman (H&M)
Agency Producer: Jack Bayley (adam&eveDDB)
Assistant Producer: Jimena Seoane (adam&eveDDB)
Director: Fredrik Bond (Sonny London)
Producer: Alicia Richards (Sonny London)
Editor: Tim Thornton-Allan (Marshall Street Editors)
Assistant Editor: Matthew Pochettino (Marshall Street Editors)
Sound Designer: Anthony Moore (Factory Studios)
VFX Supervisor, Project Lead: Jonathan Westley (MPC)
Creative Director: Feargal Ballance (adam&eveDDB)
Post Producer: Justin Stiebel (MPC)
The Campaign
We created a campaign opposition to the well-worn semiotics of fashion advertising, and tapped into the insight that our audience is influenced more by long form content and programming than traditional ‘advertising’. We created a short ‘mocumentary’ featuring David Beckham and US comedian Kevin Hart, showing Kevin’s attempt to ‘Become Beckham’ for an upcoming audition in the David Beckham biopic – mimicking his every move, and effortlessly cool, everyday style.
The campaign included teasing our audience with a series of organic social posts from David’s and Kevin’s Instagram accounts, as well as behind the scenes short films (15”) leading up to the launch of the 7 minute hero film.
Creative Execution
The resulting execution was a 7-minute short ‘mocumentary’ starring David Beckham, featuring Kevin Hart.
We created a 30” trailer for the content, which broke online and on TV in 10 key markets, pushing consumers to watch the full 7 minute film online, available globally.
The film, shot by world-renowned director Frederik Bond, shows David hosting Kevin Hart, who is spending time with David to research the title role in “I, Beckham”, the movie.
The genre is one that David isn’t known for and as a result shows a side of Beckham that the world rarely gets to see.
The campaign was hugely successful.
The 7-minute film was viewed over 20M times. A sign of the likeability of the content was demonstrated by the fact that 6.1M views were organic – viewers deliberately searching out the content. Not only that but 75% of the viewers watched the content to completion.
Viewers on YouTube shared the video onto other platforms 16,400 times (x10 more than the previous H&M Modern Essentials campaign). This goes to prove that people appreciated the content at a level where they chose to share it with their peers.
It is the most liked and favourited, the most shared and video with the highest view time of all H&M videos on YouTube.?The video also has a 27 % points more male viewers than the H&M average.
Not only this, but the film was picked up by key news organisations and media outlets: Complex, E! and Hollywood
H&M challenged us to generate interest and buzz around the Modern Essentials Collection (released at every autumn/winter) selected by David Beckham. We needed to show an unexpected side of David that would make our global male audience (18-30) sit up and take notice.
We created a campaign opposition to the well-worn semiotics of fashion advertising, and tapped into the insight that our audience is influenced more by long form content and programming than traditional ‘advertising’. We created a ‘mocumentary’ series featuring David Beckham and US comedian Kevin Hart.
Our target audience were global males aged 18-30, a group that are traditionally hard to reach using just traditional above-the-line media. Indeed, we knew that this group were leading the increases in online video consumption which had grown by 23% YoY in 2015 (http://www.zenithoptimedia.com/mobile-drive-19-8-increase-online-video-consumption-2016/).
So instead of continuing what had gone before (30” TVC, print based media, short form online video) we wanted to create long-form content that would entertain our consumers – creating something that they genuinely wanted to watch. After all, if they are consuming up to 2 hours and 15 minutes of online video every week (http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2014/the-men-the-myths-the-legends-why-millennial-dudes-might-be-more-receptive-to-marketing.html) surely we could convince them to engage with our content for 7 minutes?
The key was to utilize our talent, David Beckham, in a way that he hadn’t been captured before, to create content that was genuinely disruptive for the category, and entertaining for the consumer.