Situation: HBCUs & HBCU Students face inequity while often being underrepresented and overlooked in marketing efforts. Conversely, HBCU students & alumni represent a crucial & loyal growth audience - making resonating with them an important part of achieving business goals.

Brief: Create a 360 strategic marketing platform that delivers on business goals, grows market share, and drives resonance, affinity, and positive impact for HBCU students & alumni.

Objectives: Activate at key HBCU Tentpoles (Homecoming/Classics/Summits) to drive resonance. Increase brand affinity and P&G reputation with AA consumers by creating HBCU branded content with media activation (paid/shared/earned/owned) to grow audience reach and market growth.

It’s in the name. HBCYOU is about YOU. Well YOU if you are an HBCU student or alumni. The entire idea & IP was designed by the agency to demonstrate P&G’s unwavering commitment to the needs of this important yet underserved community while also instilling new habits featuring our products that they’ll carry into adulthood.

From 11 multi-school interactive on-campus experiences during back-to-school & Homecoming, to highly useful sampling initiatives to hyper-relevant social-first content to an overperforming TVC featuring real HBCU students aired during an HBCU football ‘Classic’, the program never once wavered from our northstar creative idea.

Our strategy was to lean into a growth audience that often goes ignored in marketing efforts - HBCU Students & Alumni. While this group is known for being loyal to brands that share their values, they are also critical of brands who want to ‘extract’ from their community without contributing.. Resonating with them authentically through experiences, products and content was not only crucial for success, it was a mandatory part of protecting the integrity of P&G brands. Through a steady drum-beat of resonant activations we needed to drive brand affinity, consideration, and trial for P&G brands. The activation approach for HBCYOU included professionally produced custom content, content creators, targeted media, experiential activations, and several sophisticated measurement tactics to rate success. Through amplified content and strategic activations across HBCU campuses, the agency & P&G created a steady drum-beat of activity both online and in person.

the agency activated 11 HBCU campus experiences on the HBCYOU tour, developed a digital media plan and 2 branded video spots, activated 12 creators and 2 music artists , distributed over $200K in scholarships and book awards, and distributed over 300K product samples to over 50,000 students and alumni. The tour lasted from August 2023 (3rd week) - December 2023 (EOY). There was placement on Experiential, Online Video, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Throughout the 2023 flight, HBCYOU garnered over 54.5 Million Impressions across HBCU students, HBCU Alumni, those with HBCU affinity, and general market. Over 300,000 everyday essential P&G products were distributed to students & alumni, across 11 HBCU campus events to 50,000 people.

This campaign saw above average engagement and delivered 54.5MM impressions across social and paid and in-person engagements. The HBCYOU experiential footprints consistently converted between 50-70% in our 1p data capture program, compared to similar brand events that converted at 23%-36%. Throughout our experiential activations we distributed 350,000 digital coupons, 300,000 product samples, and achieved 7,000 1p data captures. Standard industry response rates do not apply to the HBCYou initiative. However, Influencer engagement tracked at 5% (3% above industry benchmark), 91% completion rate of video content; and direct in-person experiences performed at twice the industry benchmark for conversion from ‘Seen’ to ‘Engaged’. We prompted HBCU students to be more aware of the products in their everyday lives and choose P&G more often because of their product superiority and value alignment. We provided students education on the product benefits in a crucial learning stage. as they are making buying choices alone.