To promote the new antiperspirant range for Adidas, Coty and Five by Five used the nation’s love of football to show the importance of getting ready, both mentally and physically.
George Roberts, client director at Five by Five, said that the difference between the campaign for Adidas body range to that of rivals Lynx and Sure was that this did not have a large media spend with the aim to ‘plaster it everywhere’, and the goal was to grab the attention of the audience in what is a low-interest market.
“Our brief was really to grab the attention of our target audience in a high-spending, low-interest category. We knew because of the budgets that our competitors were spending, we had to create something different, with cut-through, and going online enabled us to do that and to take license with the Adidas brand,” he said.
Graeme Bralsford, head of marketing for fragrance and toiletries at Coty UK, added: “It was important that all the work that we did played to the Adidas brand values: the all authentic, the all energetic brand values that sit with the Adidas brand. Positivity and authenticity is massively important, and Adidas is all of this, within its brand values.”
Having launched at the start of the year, the promotion for the body product began with a brand awareness campaign, before a ‘recruitment’ stage launched in February to encourage members of the public to show their keepy-uppy skills, for the chance to win a holiday to Brazil.
The second stage ran both online, and through an experiential event at Spitalfields Market, with winners chosen because of their personality, as well as their ability to keep a ball in the air.The four winners of the competition were whisked off for what Roberts described as a ‘premiership experience’, where they were put through their paces before being taken to a secret location to take part in a penalty shootout.“They didn’t have a clue what was going to happen,” Roberts said. “All they knew was they had to take a penalty, and they were told that they had to get three out of four penalties to win a trip to Brazil. We wanted to dial up that pressure by putting them in a different environment. We found a place called Collins Music Hall, which essentially looks like Dr Evil’s secret underground lair.”
There was a crowd of 250 people in the Hall, to ramp up the pressure for the four taking part, as they waited in the changing room to take their shot.“We were always going to reward them for being able to step up and cope with the pressure,” Roberts confided, even if not all got their penalty shot. “The fact that they were able to step up was sufficient. That was success, being prepared to have a go,” Bralsford added.
The final stage of the £1.5m campaign, the One Shot for Brazil video, is now online, and will be promoted through YouTube and prerolls as well as through interactive display ads.The majority of the rival brands focus on what their product does and how it works, so Coty and Five by Five wanted to focus on an emotional and lifestyle message. “Where some competitor brands do lean towards a more emotional message they execute it in a way that it is unbelievable and plays on humour,” Roberts said.“Or there are ads with people climbing up rock faces. The majority of our audience don’t do that, but most will go out, kick a ball about, watch the World Cup and have the inevitable conversations about penalties – so we wanted the content to reflect that and at the same time be more relevant. Adidas body care is not for when you’re about to climb a rock face, or just about to fly a spaceship to the moon to get lots of women, it’s all about real situations.”The campaign will run until May.
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