The challenge was convincing a younger female audience focused on beauty and fashion to even try a brand usually found in the dentist’s office. We needed to get them to make a real connection between their health-minded beauty values and True White—versus other leading products focused solely on whitening.

Our insight? We all do things that aren’t the best for us in order to look and feel beautiful—from wearing stylish but uncomfortable shoes to tanning to even whitening sensitive teeth. We know it can be unhealthy, but we do it anyway. So we took a human truth and inverted it to be our campaign line, “Beauty Without Compromise.” And offered a solution that, with its vertical tube and sleek packaging, offered a solution that both looked and felt good for those with sensitive teeth.

Working with a consumer-centric field marketing partner, Mosaic NY, we developed the True White Sensitivity Suite and cast TV host Desi Sanchez as our spokesperson at pop-up events in Miami and New York City. We asked passersby to complete a “touch-test”—allowing them to physically feel the difference between True White’s low abrasion formula and other leading whitening toothpastes.

Desi also hit the streets to unearth the one thing not everyone is willing to share: the real compromises that women make to look their best—and showed them that they can keep their sensitive teeth healthy and have a whiter smile.

The campaign culminated with a YouTube masthead takeover on October 19, 2016, where the brand had total share of voice across all desktop and mobile devices.

True White is currently driving 48% of the Sensodyne brand growth, and was the strongest new product launch in GSK’s oral care history. Repurchase is strong, with 20% of repeat households having purchased the brand over four times.

Our YouTube takeover was cited as being one of the most successful takeovers in history, surpassing the YouTube performance benchmark by 25%. The masthead video was viewed 2.8 million times, amounting to 25,000 hours of brand interaction time—in just one day. Our content drove a 28% increase in Google searches of the brand and added 12,000 new subscribers to the Sensodyne YouTube channel.

True White maintained double-digit sales growth that is had five times the toothpaste category growth, and that achieved the strongest week of consumption in brand history following the masthead date.