In the 2013 season we were targeting the UK’s hay fever sufferers. The challenge; to create cut through in a market where there had been no new product news in a long time.

Specifically, to drive differentiation and value by increasing sales by 15%.

Pollen maps existed but they weren’t meeting the consumer need. Social listening and interviews helped us understand the highly localised nature of hay fever suffering.

This in turn led us to developing the Social Pollen Count; a very local and very live pollen count app, that drew upon sufferer’s blitz spirit, putting them at the heart of reporting their hay fever suffering. Users could submit their own pollen ‘hotspots’ live to the map, which then became a resource for all hay fever sufferers.

Our integrated campaign constituted the Social Pollen Count, as a native app and web app on mobile and as a desktop service, DOOH, digital display and sponsorship idents of the Pollen Count Weather on ITV.

The outcome was over 150K downloads of the native app with over 51K hotspots added.

This was a truly integrated campaign with touchpoints in many channels, which all reinforced the key messaging of Benadryl being the brand that truly empathises with hay fever sufferers.

In 2013 the SPC itself was a useful service for hay-fever sufferers, in the form of the native app and the web mobile app and desktop. The campaign around the SPC strongly utilised the unique features of the app, to highlight the strength of the service through media. This was done through smart media buying in terms of DOOH, coupled with creative executions in across digital media channels. The DOOH work was localised, with a local area map being displayed with our SPC hotspot pins on top of it, but only when the pollen count in that local area was high or very high. DOOH ran from June – end of August, digital display ran from April – end of May and the TV sponsorship was from May-August, all these media channels combined with the app and desktop created a useful, creative and unique service for hay-fever sufferers.

Overall Benadryl’s sales volume increased by 16% in the 2013 season, thus hitting the overall financial goal of the campaign. In total we had 156,627 total new users of the app, with 51,228 hotspots added, both beating our KPI’s.