Branded Entertainment, castigated in the past as advertorial, sell-o-vision or even clandestine advertising, lost much of its legal stigma in Germany with a revision to the national broadcasting charter (Rundfunkvertrag) in 2010.Simultaneously, media consumption patterns in our market increasingly shifted online.Our typical AXE target spends more than 2 hours a day surfing the internet – longer than he spends in front of the TV.This development is now reflected in Branded Entertainment, which is appearing with increasing regularity on the internet in video/moving picture form, eg. as WebTV on the highest-reach online platforms (e.g. Musicmix on Tape.tv, time4fashion on yahoo, web soap Nigel & Victoria on Youtube).

An initial awareness-building phase used a 360-degree media campaign with a 7' TV tag, Citylights, PR features and online banners. After that, we focused on homepage takeovers on YouTube and MSN. We then created a wide variety of rich media banners and launched a major media partnership with Bild.de, Germanys biggest newspaper, where our target group interacted directly with the advent calendar. The high level of interactivity was fundamentally driven by users themselves: users who suggested gift ideas then canvassed votes from their friends, causing the campaign and our content to spread virally.

Distributing our content on multiple platforms and integrating sharing mechanisms for the films were key to maximising the campaign reach.

During the 6-week campaign phase, we received more than 8m content views, 140,800 users who voted and 18,795 users who suggested gift ideas. More than 51,000 users shared the ideas on social media networks. The campaign attracted nearly 30,000 new fans on Facebook. Through PR featuring, we achieved over 150m contacts within the target group.

Thanks to a TV and digital activation campaign, the product variant became the third strongest in the entire AXE deodorant range. We thus reached our ambitious goal of creating a social phenomenon among the target group and turning AXE consumers into fans.