With temperatures in the UAE rising to 52 degrees, Axe introduced its new Axe ice-chill which decreases body temperature by 6 degrees. Axe was looking to penetrate the market through the lifestyle space, with messaging around supporting men to be the best version of themselves to approach the opposite sex. Axe’s messaging was to tell men to “chill out” instead of trying too hard.

Our main objectives were to: increase awareness, consideration, and conversion with Axe’s core audiences.

Axe needed to create a niche for itself that helps the brand establish its own claim and better connect to males in the market to drive them toward conversion. The focus was on identifying the right platform/technology to empower our audiences and deliver them messages during the day.

The brand message through the campaign was “you’re hotter when you’re chill”.

The target audience was Males - 15-34, who spent most of their time on mobile phones. We focused on cohort segments such as: Gaming, Music, Fitness, Generic etc. Our total audience size formed 83% of the demographic audience, categorized by interests, allowing us to create specific messaging. Overlap was 20%.

Our focus was driving awareness and creating social interaction by empowering our audience through self-confidence messaging during different stages of the day. We implemented an in-depth strategy across 3 different Native mobile platforms:

1. Video - Reach based video planning to drive our penetration among males and raise awareness of our claim.

2. Content - Publisher partnerships such as Lovin Dubai to establish our story by creating comical content videos

3. Weather Based Execution - Leveraging weather conditions and tying back to the functional aspect of dropping body temperature to convert the audience using dynamic ads based on contextual focus

Over 60% of budgets were focused on mobile. Our key publisher partners helped create targeted ads in hot locations using geo-fencing technology.

1. Deployed dynamic banners triggered by real-time weather and humidity ran on popular online portals and programmatic inventory.

2. Launched the first weather-based dynamic audio ads with Anghami to generate engagement, more direct and faster path to conversion

3. Promoted a range of content communication passion points such as gaming, music, sport as well as different cohorts on the product benefits through our mobile-driven content engine

4. Deployed Funny memes and gifs, inspired from local insights and behaviors of guys when impressing a girl, throughout the campaign on platforms like Lovin’ Dubai, whom we partnered with, helped drive visibility for AXE Ice Chill even further. (Instagram focus)

The timeline for execution was: Sep - Nov 2019 for Gulf

Through the Axe Chill campaign we saw both performance and business success, and most importantly achieved our brand KPIs.

With this dynamic and targeted approach brand awareness increased across our target audience, with an increase of 18% on InMobi and 20% on Anghami.

Moreover, ad recall surpassed our nearest competitor as per surveyed audience:

17% Ad Recall Up-lift on YT Trueview BLS

11% Ad Recall Up-lift on YT Bumper Ads

We also saw great increase in our conversion KPIs:

+20% Brand Favorability lift on Anghami

+11% Purchase Intent lift on Anghami

+8% Brand Preference lift on InMobi

+13% Purchase Intent lift on InMobi

Making this campaign an ultimate success Axe gained market share too through Axe Ice Chill! Axe grew by 11 BPS in the UAE and 6 BPS across the Gulf.