The main strategic objective for Unilever’s Lifebuoy campaign was to increase brand awareness while delivering education around hand hygiene and a warning on the curfew across Egypt during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lifebuoy, the world’s number one hygiene soap brand, runs the world’s largest behaviour change program to encourage hand washing, to help achieve their brand goal to help one billion people around the world improve their hygiene behaviour by the end of 2020. In response to the global COVID pandemic and the government-imposed curfew, the brand has embarked on a public service campaign to remind people that hand hygiene and using any soap brand can help reduce the spread of infections while reminding people to stay home.

For this, the brand launched a campaign in collaboration with mobile location advertising and analytics partner, Blis. The nation-wide campaign focused on reaching consumers who were not at home, but out and about with safety precautions messages:

- Reminding them to wear a mask

- Wash their hands with any soap brand

- Providing a countdown of when the curfew will start

Lifebuoy is a well known brand globally but is relatively small is Egypt. The challenge was how to reach people en masse, across Egypt, in real-time with relevant and timely messaging. This is where Lifebuoy sought the advice of Blis to accurately target people when they weren’t at home with prompt and engaging messages on mobile to educate and encourage behavioural change.

Lifebuoy wanted to target audiences in real-time, at scale across Egypt when they weren’t in the home before the curfew started with public safety messaging. Blis used it’s location targeting product to negatively target residential areas to serve dynamic media mobile units to people who were out and about.

Lifebuoy wanted to target people of all demographic factors, as the COVID virus does not discriminate between age, sex etc. The only prerequisite of the target audience is that their movement data showed that they were out and about between 7am - to 7pm.

The media strategy for the campaign was to serve these dynamic creative mobile ads in real-time to audience groups across Egypt, who were out and about during the day before the 7pm country-wide curfew. Blis and Lifebuoy choose to serve dynamic media ads using a frequency cap of three to ensure audiences weren't bombarded with same messaging.

For the creative strategy part of the campaign, Blis’ design team created three frame, dynamic rich media units in three different sizes using Celtra. The dynamic creative displayed the countdown timer warning of the curfew, which changed based on the time of the day the ad was served. While targeting in real time people who were not home.

Mobile was the channel of choice as it enabled Lifebuoy to target people in real-time when they were out and about, when the messaging in the adverts was of most use and importance. Reaching the target audience with relevant messaging and in a contextual relevant environment, increased brand awareness of the Lifebuoy brand. The public service messaging and not direct promotional messaging kept Lifebuoy front of mind and built brand equity with customers at such an unprecedented time, when they were looking for empathy and assistance from brands.

The campaign reached its objectives and surpassed the set benchmarks goals in CTR and viewability. After the first week of the campaign, impressions fell but click through rate was maintained which was highly impressive

Other key stats and results:

Total unique devices tracked: 2,006,054

Viewability rate: 82% (Viewability KPI 70%)

Impressions: 5,495,253

Clicks: 107,890

CTR: 1.96% (Benchmark 0.6%)

Best performing CTR for time and day

The best day for engagement was Thursday with a 18.89% CTR and the best performing time of day was 1pm-4pm with a 6.26% CTR.

Business Results:

While for business results Lifebuoy had 4X LB USG in H1 and 7X E Com growth in skin cleansing category and is now officially a 100M EGP brand.