Bonds: The Boys [video] 2

Credits & Description:

Category: Clothing & footwear
Client: PAC Brands
Agency: Clemenger BBDO Melbourne
Country: Australia
Client - Pacific Brands Underwear Group
Emily Small - Head of Marketing, Bonds
Mahli Pullen - Senior Brand Manager, Bonds
Jessica Harvey - Brand Manager, Bonds
Agency - Clemenger BBDO Melbourne
Ant Keogh - ECD
Ant Phillips - Creative Director
Richard Williams - Creative Director
Simon Lamplough - Group Managing Director
Kellie Lennon - Business Director
Michael Derepas - Senior Planner
Karolina Bozajkovska - Senior Producer
Sharon Adams - Operations Director
Production Company - Guilty Productions
Tony Rogers - Director
Jason Byrne - Producer
Marin Johnson - DOP
Micheal J Luteman - Editor (c/o The Butchery)
Photographer - Chris Budgeon
Features: Pages, Facebook Platform, Boosted Posts, Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed, Reach & Target Blocks, Video Ads
Language: English (UK)
Objectives: Awareness, Preference, Intent, Online Traffic, Offline Traffic, Sales, Recommendation, Direct Response
Tags: Retail, Asia Pacific, English (UK), Pages, Facebook Platform, Boosted Posts, Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed, Reach & Target Blocks, Video Ads, Awareness, Preference, Intent, Online Traffic, Offline Traffic, Sales, Recommendation, Direct Response, Online, Point Of Sale (POS)  
Campaign Description
Bonds is the biggest underwear brand in Australia. For years they have had little to no competition in this category. Bonds had become ubiquitous, and pretty much the standard that men were comfortable with.
This was a good place to be, as blokes don’t really think, or care about their undies. Blokes could safely and effortlessly pick the same pairs up off the shelf when their old ones literally fell apart, or their girlfriend/wife said ‘enough was enough’, and magically delivered new ones into their man’s top drawer.
In recent times however blokes had been forced to consider alternatives. Aggressive private labels had ramped up their attack and were half the price of Bonds. And as ‘fast followers’ their product innovation and styles closely replicated Bonds, leaving a value equation even the most loyal Bonds customers had to process. In 2015 Bonds Mens Underwear sales were down 14% YOY in a category that was growing at 21% YOY.
Given the strength of competitive market factors, Bonds knew they had to be clever in how they started to firstly get men to care more about their undies, with the longer-term ambition of eventually helping the men of Australia to justify the price premium that comes with a pair of Bonds.
Thus with a long-term behaviour change strategy in place, the campaign objectives for this first phase were tight and not linked to an immediate sales effect:
1. Get Australian males 18-39 thinking and talking with their mates about their (choice of) undies.
2. Re-establish Bonds credentials as the owner of ‘comfy undies’.
Campaign Goals
The creative solution centered around 3 online videos that were highly engaging, but slightly risqué. We were of the belief that with a clever media strategy these videos had the potential of earning a great deal of free media. It was therefore essential for us to find a large scale media platform where the videos could be shared and commented on fulfilling our objective to get men 18-39 thinking and talking with their mates about undies again.
Facebook was the perfect solution. Given we only had a media budget of $150k, traditional above the line channels were not going to be effective. Facebook provided us with the opportunity to be very precise in our targeting, ensuring we reach our demographic with little to no wastage. Our launch coincided with Facebook actively optimizing video content dramatically increasing our ability to reach our demographic.
Facebook also offered us the chance to talk to guys while they were hanging out, a moment that would most likely facilitate social sharing of our message. They key to the success of this campaign was in the social sharing, we were able to see guys engage with the videos then endorse them by sharing them with mates.
We released the three videos every two weeks on Facebook to build up a loyal audience, create some desire to see the next instalment and to be able to maximize views for each video before moving on to the next one. We utilised Facebook’s retargeting features to ensure that there was a consistent arc and minimal repetition, which in turn increased engagement and awareness.
Every post featuring our videos included a link that directed blokes to the Bonds online store to buy a new pair of undies.
Campaign Performance
The campaign more than achieved its word of mouth goals, and was a proven success in terms of views, shares and earned media.
The three-long-form videos have to date achieved over 3.5 million views across Facebook and YouTube. Engagement for each of the spots was way above norms (and expectations) with video view completion above 50% – that’s particularly impressive given the length of the videos. On top of this the 30” pre-rolls and short-form video content cut-downs reached an additional 2.7m eyeballs.
Likes, comments and shares across Facebook far exceeded Bonds norms and achieved an average cost per view of $0.06. As each video was released, men were sharing it with their friends and asking for the next instalment.
Bonds tracking has shown that awareness of ‘The Boys’ amongst the target audience of 18-34-year-old men was over 40%, which for a media investment of approx. $150K and a production budget of $70K is exceptionally high, higher even than the awareness a big budget Bonds TV campaign would ordinarily achieve.
‘The Boys’ got men talking about underwear with their mates for the first time, sharing the videos online and thinking about the danger of trading down to own-label brands.