To develop CLIF Bar’s campaign we embraced the culture of outdoor adventure. We turned internally to CLIF’s people, adventurers in their own right. From there we immersed ourselves in outdoor consumer culture from sources like Mintel and the Outdoor Foundation. And we built custom digital-adventurer targets in syndicated media research like ComScore, MRI and Nielsen.

What we came to understand was that no matter how often you get outside, there is a glue that binds all adventurers. Adventure is not found at the top of the mountain or the finish line. What we all share is the thrill of the unknown, the exhilaration of the uncharted.*

Our consumer insight was also a basic consumer truth: consumers had less time to participate in outdoor adventure as they spent more time indoors.* Consumers crave more outdoor experiences and had less opportunity to find them.*

Our goal was to inspire outdoor adventure.

At the core of the digital media campaign was the interactive video experience. To deliver the outdoors through a platform that is anything but tactile, we worked with Google’s engineers to build and troubleshoot the experience after an exhaustive review of media and technology partners. Once built, we supported the campaign with <$1MM in paid media – not much compared to other adventure brands. If the campaign was going to drive results, engagement would need to distinctly over deliver.

The media plan had to strike a balance between mass digital channels that delivered reach with targeted channels that delivered CLIF’s core 18-49 Athletic Adventurer. For a brand with a modest budget and short flight (July to October), we went first to YouTube and complemented this with engagement through Social (Facebook, Instagram) and Athletic Adventurer partners (Rodale, HULU). And while scale was challenging, it became much easier with a first-to-market idea...

In addition to strong social sharing, the media campaign delivered:

Purchase: CLIF jumped into the #3 spot for the July Shelf Score measuring purchase intent. This complemented an immediate spike in sales compared to 2014.

Engagement: CLIF set new industry records. Our video had an unheard of average of 7:32 view time and a benchmark-setting view-through rate of 54%.

Performance was so strong that the video had over 10 million minutes spent during our three-month campaign – that’s twenty+ years of time! (Source: DFA, YouTube).

But our primary mission was to increase brand equity:

We tripled our brand favorability goal with a 14.8% lift for those exposed (Source: Nielsen/Vizu).

We more than doubled our consideration goal with a lift of 5.9%.

And we not only reached Google’s “Best In Class” benchmark for recall but saw it rise by 58.4%...

Making this one of the most impactful campaigns of 2015.