The Campaign

Three contemporary poems written about milk that inspire teenagers to be themselves and create their own definition of strength. The campaign takes a disruptive approach to reach a younger audience, and reframe how milk from how it’s traditionally been perceived within the FMCG category.

Creative Execution

World Champ Slam Poet Harry Baker wrote three poems about milk. Each poem was brought to life by a visual artist who interpreted the words. “Inside-out” is animated using motion graphics, “Real” is a short documentary-style filmed experiment, and “Blank Canvas” is choreographed and performed by dance icon, Parris Goebel. Our films also ran in cinema and as TV spots. We used each poem to create three pieces of radio that explore a range of effects and real-world sounds associated with milk. To reach young people around cities and universities, we created street posters inspired by social media and a fragmented experience of images. The poems were also published as print layouts in student magazines across the country. Through Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook we created online communities for teens to further explore the campaign, and become part of it by sharing their own content.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

86% of the target audience watched our films across our digital channels and the campaign had 1.5M video views in a country of just 4.5 million.   Facebook completion rates were 7x better than the industry benchmark. Particularly impressive given the average attention span of our audience. Since campaign launch, time spent on Anchor’s YouTube channel has more than tripled.   Short-term sales results weren’t a key objective for this campaign, as we believed there was more value in building long term brand affection. We saw the first signs of success with 79% positive brand sentiment after engaging with the campaign. Our Instagram followers increased 9.4% in the first week, and Snapchat followers increased 44% since the start of the campaign.   Unaided awareness of Anchor was more than 80% after watching the films, proving you don’t need to hammer teenagers over the head with your branding if you’ve got an engaging story.

Anchor have always communicated with mums as the household shopper. Milk was relevant in helping them raise strong and healthy kids. But brand sentiment suffered, because few people outside of the narrow target audience felt that Anchor was interesting. This campaign was about connecting with a hard to reach audience at a time when they need milk the most. If we could genuinely find common ground with young people, and prompt them to see milk as being relevant, we could transform their perception of Anchor and empower a new generation of teens to get enough calcium in their diet at a critical time. Teenagers are quick to call out the inauthentic. So instead of telling our audience what to do, or think, we unpacked the genuine and complex science of milk in a fresh and compelling way. We used poetry and artistic collaborations to make milk memorable and cool again.