The Brief

Dolmio is a brand built on TV advertising which is always centred around an Italian family of puppets. But with a poignant message to share and a small budget, we knew TV wasn’t the right choice to generate buzz and conversation around this modern day issue. So we created a new piece of technology, the Dolmio Pepper Hacker, and conducted a social experiment with real families that directly engaged both those participating and a much wider audience via an online film and a call to action to share the film and help the brand raise awareness of the issue that technology has hijacked family dinnertime.

Creative Execution

Dolmio are a brand that believe in bringing families together at dinnertime. 4 key phases: 1. Soft Launch: 24th March Launched the video on Youtube and supported with Truview pre-rolls in Australia only. 2. Seed: 24-26th March Shared our video exclusively with one of Australia’s highest reaching news shows – The Project, and anchored our story in consumer research highlighting the issue of technology hijacking dinnertime. 3. Hard Launch: 26th March A mass consumer, technology and industry PR rollout. 4. Amplify: w/c 30th March Following questions around how the technology got around signal blocking laws we arranged a one-on-one interview with key trade media to discuss legalities and the creative technological solution. The resulting article became the go-to link, and was frequently referenced by consumers in heated online discussions. The film went viral which drove further conversations about the issue and views of the film.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Dolmio is predominately purchased by mothers but consumed by all the family. An Australian favourite, it can be found in over 2 million household across the country. Recently however, the Italian Food category has been in decline due to more exciting food categories such as Mexican. Dolmio needed to become relevant again. So as a brand that believes dinnertime should bring families together, our campaign was designed to speak directly to both mothers and families, generating conversation around the use of technology during dinnertime.

Results

To say the campaign exceeded client expectations would be an understatement. The campaign exceeded the KPI’s set for online views of the film by a staggering 16,394% (KPI set at 500,000 views). In just 4 weeks we achieved: - Over 3 billion earned media impressions - Over 82 million views of the online film across YouTube and Facebook - $27.2 million in earned media Social media commentary showed our audience was inspired to ditch the tech and reconnect at dinnertime. Tens of thousands of commented, tweets praised the campaign and it’s family-centric messaging and the film achieved over 1.25 million shares on Facebook alone.