The Brief

Most people (over 90%) have breath problems at some point, but never even realize it. The brief was to raise awareness of Crest Tea Fresh product as a solution by bringing light to the problem in an engaging way. We intended to reach a new younger target for Crest, which had previously focused on housewives and mum’s, being the main shoppers of household toiletries. But with an increasing number of young people becoming significant spenders on toiletries in China, we sought to find a tone of voice and vehicle for Crest that was relevant and interesting for the internet generation.

Creative Execution

The creative poked fun at our stereotype of serial internet daters. By using pretty girls and exaggerated comedy, with a hint of surrealism we created a tone that delighted our younger target audience and left them wanting to experience the next execution.They would never have imagined an a toothpaste to target them at that point. In terms of branding, we were careful to keep the tone playful and humorous, but not disgusting, riding on Crest’s global brand platform of smiling. The product is introduced in a very clean and direct way as a solution to the problem, echoing the refreshing message and product benefit of refreshment.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

The creative made use of current China internet user habits of online socializing, and made some fun at the current perception of online daters as sad real world sociopaths. The use of interactive banners attracted attention at key dating sites and portals, and users were surprised to be drawn into an interactive game without having to leave the site they were on. This reduced the barrier to the normal click through response rates of a static banner.

Results

We understood the internet community really appreciated this piece of creative work. The average time spent interacting on these banners was well over 2 minutes – a real feat given that most banner ads are largely ignored. We registered over 30,000 click-throughs to the Crest site within the first 24 hours of launching and logged several mentions and forwardings on various social networking sites including KaiXinWang and Facebook.