The Campaign

Traditional approaches to Branded Entertainment in Singapore typically leveraged against the popularity of celebrities or prominent figures to connect Brands with consumers, this approach, although high profile and entertaining garners significant media attention but lacks can lack the ability to leave relevant lasting impressions on consumers. With this in mind, AXA intended to communicate to consumers from the ground up via the various stories shared. This strengthened AXA’s brand promise and improve brand preference through emotional, compelling and differentiated storytelling

Results

Challenge The challenge was to produce branded content without the aid of using celebrities but instead with the everyday Singaporean. We had to uncover 50 extraordinary stories around Protecting Others, Protecting Cultures or even Protecting the Planet, celebrating and giving props to the Protection Heroes in Singapore. Objectives The campaign had to strengthen AXA’s association with Protection through an emotional engagement and eventually motivate Brand preference towards AXA. Strategy Aligning to the Jubilee celebration for Singapore’s 50th year of independence, we wanted to capture 50 stories and salute the 50 Protection Heroes who have went out of their way to protect others or a cause in Singapore over the course of Singapore’s history. Call for entry will be collected via Archived Stories or through the campaign’s call to action and the content will be amplified through paid channels leading up to an event that aimed to Execution The campaign kicked off with a 2-pronged approach for Stories submission through a call for nomination amongst Singaporeans and also a curation of impactful stories that were available from archives. These 50 stories were then featured and shared on the micro-site with traffic drivers to help spread their stories all across Singapore and eventually compiled into ab e-book that was sold online with proceeds being donated to the Halogen Foundation in Singapore Traffic to the microsite was amplified through an exclusive partnership with Yahoo through high impact creatives on its Homepage, Display banners on both Desktop and mobile as well as content partnership through a microsite developed and housed under Yahoo. At the last leg of the whole campaign, the “Born a Hero” event was held to feature the heroes of the SAF which also ties in with SG50 and SAF50, celebrating Singapore’s independence while also aligned with AXA’s Born to Protect messaging.

Ideas in Action did not feature celebrities; instead we centred on fact that it was the everyday Singaporean sharing their stories and being hailed as heroes. Each story was individually curated and optimized. We took learnings from the response on each story and applied it to subsequent stories, tweaking the style to keep users engaged. While different forms of protection resonated with the broad campaign audience, it was important to select content which would not only achieve an emotional pull but also discovery on wider issues in the region, such as child trafficking in Cambodia unravelled by a Singaporean couple.

The campaign was a huge success for AXA. Through Milward Brown's brand study, we’ve seen significant uplifts in brand attribution: Aided Brand Awareness increased by 28.6% Brand Favorability by 23.9% Message Association by 12.1% Key KPIs of the campaign exceeded expectations Targeted Page Views: 620,000 Delivered Page Views: 698,461 (113%) Targeted Clicks: 220,000 Delivered Clicks: 442,802 (201%) Targeted Shares: 10,000 Delivered Shares: 11,523 (115%) The campaign shifted perceptions for AXA’s main target audience: individuals aged 25–55 with monthly income of $5,000+, driving association between AXA and the term “Protection” by 23% and the overall purchase intent by an amazing 38.5%

“Content marketing is all about telling a compelling story’ ~ Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute, and with this ultimate brand campaign aimed at communicating the AXA’s ‘Born to Protect’ mission we exemplified the essence of ‘Protection’ through every day people’s stories of extraordinary acts to protect something or someone in their lives. Adopting a consumer first content approach, the stories were placed at the heart of the campaign in order to strengthen and demonstrate the brand promise and commitment of protection in every facet, driving brand preference through emotional, compelling and differentiated story-telling methods, reinforcing and connecting AXA’s Born to Protect mission with our target audience