AJAX has always been marketed with the promise of clean, glistening white tiles in Sweden, and as consumers we've been promised this goes even for the toughest dirt on the whitest tiles.

In March 2017, Stockholm replaced the old billboards in the subway, and behind them, 60 years of dirty tiles were revealed. This was the perfect opportunity to prove AJAX’s benefit. In the middle of the night, we used the dirty tiles as our canvas to create a powerful message and prove that AJAX really makes dirty tiles white, through a real life demo.

We had to move quickly, as the city was eager to clean up the subway and put up the new billboards as soon as possible.

Due to our budget, we only had one three-piece series space to work with and therefore only one chance (and only three hours when the train traffic shut down for the night) to do it right. The craft was everything – if we had “cleaned up” the dirt in the wrong way, we would’ve hurt the brand instead of building it. One slip and the piece would be destroyed.  

But with great art direction and craft and with a great detergent product, we managed to clean the billboards to perfection. Using traditional cleaning rhetoric, but in a new context – not talking about it in an ad, but by proving it.

A real life product demo people actually liked, wanted to see and even shared.

During the 11 days that our “ad” was up, we managed to reach over 2,5 million people with a single OOH. Due to strategic media planning and flawless execution we managed to achieve a record low CPM cost of only 0,42 EUR (2 524 676 / 6000 EUR).

And what’s extraordinary is that the ad performed the highest ad liking for a subway OOH ever in Sweden (90% vs the previous record of 83%). According to a survey made, everyone who had seen the ad in the subway station also succeeded to point out the brand promise and message for the campaign.

Sales reps for Colgate-Palmolive in Sweden now use the documented results in their sales presentations.