It’s no secret that teens live their lives online. Branded Entertainment for teens in Australia is no exception. According to a white paper in eMarketer, over 50% of Australian teens have participated in branded activity on a social site. This is a double-edged sword for a campaign like ours. While we know teens crave this kind of interaction with brands online, the challenge we faced was the difficulty of targeting teens directly in digital channels. Australian media partners limit our capabilities to buy directly against 13-17 yr. olds as part of self-regulation in the industry to protect teens. We had to use the data we have at hand and place our digital comms contextually, essentially making an educated guess about where to best reach them. With this context, our results with teens are even more impressive.

Emotionally:

Research showed us that our Unstoppable stories draw teens in because they tap into their underlying fear of missing out. The stories show individuals overcoming great obstacles that inspire teens to believe they could take on and overcome their own challenges.

Functionally:

We wanted to give teens a sense of authentic discovery. To do this, we launched the campaign among popular teen influencer sites (pedestrian TV, Boom, Unruly). We knew teens were naturally drawn to these sites based on subject matter and content. We then drove reach through Facebook and YouTube with our hero videos.

The campaign is only three months old at the time of writing. Yet already, the campaign has been a success in both client and consumer terms. For the client, it has smashed the two key metrics:

• Baseline sales of Nutri-Grain - previously trending down, now increased 21% points versus the previous year. This is a significant uplift – the likes of which most large, well-established FMCG brands can only dream of. In fact it’s the biggest sales turn around in Kellogg’s Australia’s history.

• Penetration - Sales have not just come from existing users buying it more often, but from new households buying into the brand and it is the highest it’s been since 2004.

For teens – it has proven to be compelling entertainment: at time of writing (12 weeks in) and with only two stories launched thus far we have delivered 2.5 million views and that’s still climbing minute by minute.