The Campaign

It’s no secret that teens live their lives online. Branded Entertainment for teens in Australia is no exception. According to a white paper in eMarketer, over 50% of Australian teens have participated in branded activity on a social site. This is a double-edged sword for a campaign like ours. While we know teens crave this kind of interaction with brands online, the challenge we faced was the difficulty of targeting teens directly in digital channels. Australian media partners limit our capabilities to buy directly against 13-17 yr. olds as part of self-regulation in the industry to protect teens. We had to use the data we have at hand and place our digital comms contextually, essentially making an educated guess about where to best reach them. With this context, our results with teens are even more impressive.

Results

Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain is an iconic $65 million Aussie brand built on the sponsorship and association with Iron Man Surf Lifesaving, which teens no longer found relevant, that resulted in a serious decline in sales and brand equity. We identified a cultural shift that we could tap into: our Gen z digital native teen audience were living in an always-on world. And they were struggling to keep up. Suffering social jetlag physically from late nights online and emotional challenges from keeping up in a high paced high expectation world. Nutri-Grain could help – fuelling them to live the life they wanted to live - an unstoppable 24/7 life. This content platform forms the heart of a long term repositioning and campaign to encourage teens to ‘live unstoppable.’ The content platform is a series of stories that reflect the long-held brand values of Strength, Courage, and Determination: the emotional underpinning for living unstoppably. This includes the development of three hero stories that received the bulk of our paid media support, and two Hub stories on the Nutri-Grain YouTube channel, the brand’s Facebook page, and website. Our two hero stories were launched three weeks apart for maximum impact on each and follow the same two-phased approach: 1. Seeding: To give teens a sense of discovery of the platform, we seeded the content on teen sites where they naturally seek out what’s ‘new’. 2. Launch: Three days after seeding the first story, we launched on YouTube and Facebook. We did this :15 second pre-rolls and :50 second teasers, that drove to our hero stories. We then broke the TVCs in paid ATL to drive teens to search for our Unstoppable stories. We plan on launching the next installment soon.

Emotionally: Research showed us that our Unstoppable stories draw teens in because they tap into their underlying fear of missing out. The stories show individuals overcoming great obstacles that inspire teens to believe they could take on and overcome their own challenges. Functionally: We wanted to give teens a sense of authentic discovery. To do this, we launched the campaign among popular teen influencer sites (pedestrian TV, Boom, Unruly). We knew teens were naturally drawn to these sites based on subject matter and content. We then drove reach through Facebook and YouTube with our hero videos.

The campaign has been a success in client and consumer terms. For the client, it smashed two key metrics: • Baseline sales - previously trending down, now increased 21% points versus the previous year. This is an uplift most well-established FMCG brands can only dream of. • Penetration - Sales have not just come from existing users, but from new households buying into the brand and it is the highest it’s been since 2004. For teens – it has proven to be compelling entertainment: at time of writing we have delivered 3 million views and that’s still climbing.

‘Nutri-Grain presents: Unstoppable’ is a branded content platform idea aimed at inspiring teens. It is not advertising. There is no product sell. There is no product placement. There is restrained branding. The purpose of the campaign is to walk the walk of the Nutri-Grain’ brand purpose – fuel unstoppable lives – by telling stories of extraordinary individuals that let nothing stop them, exhibiting the characteristics – Strength, Courage, and Determination, that we wanted to inspire in our teen target. Our campaign was centered around teen entertainment channels such as YouTube and Facebook. It launched with 3 long form Hero videos, and 2 'hub' videos featured primarily on YouTube. It also included a digital seeding strategy on key teen influencer sites. To support our Hero videos, we included annotated vignettes on YouTube. This deepened the engagement with the platform and ultimately drove to the NG website for further content.