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Brylcreem – B:Effortless
July 11th, 2008 by JamesThis is a case study for the original post Communication in the ‘Age of Recommendation’.
With thanks to Laurence Parkes, Head of Digital @ WCRS
The objective of this campaign was to re-engage a young male audience with the new B Range. WCRS came up with the idea of “Effortless Cool” and had a TV script showing a Brylcreem user showing their cool by doing really cool tricks (skateboarding, magic, etc.) effortlessly. In order to create even greater engagement, we decided to run an on-line competition to cast the hero of the ad and the music track to be used. The competition was hosted on Myspace. This was, in itself, an “engagement agent”. But we used further agents to create interest in the competition;
Experts – we approached bloggers in extreme football, magic, street basketball, etc. to get them to write about the competition and drum up interest in it.
Interest Groups – we joined discussion forums and Facebook pages around interests like pen spinning (yes, they exist!) and talked about the competition. Using a channel on YouTube we engaged with these groups by building up lists of our favourite videos.
Popularity Charts – we used SEO to increase the likelihood of the finished ad being found on sites like YouTube, whilst engaging in an old-style media campaign, but with the new media channel that is StumbleUpon.
In all of these types of agents, we gradually released content (including recent entries) to pique interest and build momentum. We created our own blog on Myspace to discuss how the competition was developing.
For only £40k we had 1,208 music entries and 194 video entries. We also had 115,000 views of the top 5 video entries alone.
