Lavazza, an Italian icon full of culture and heritage, needed to reinvigorate its brand and solidify its future with the younger Italian audience. Famous throughout Italy for its premium Italian espresso coffee, the brand had yet to effectively connect with the Italian youth online. The gaming market was identified as a target of interest, however, traditional digital marketing techniques such as display advertising are inefficient when approaching this gaming audience.

Fnatic, an icon of global esports, was briefed to introduce Lavazza to the Italian gaming world in a meaningful way.

Objectives:

Deliver over 500k live stream views

Deliver 400k organic views with branded video content

Achieve over 2 million brand impressions

Reinvigorate Lavazza’s brand among Italian gamers

The Icons of Italy campaign aligned the iconic Lavazza brand with every young Italian’s gamer’s pride of country in both the physical and the digital world. We allowed them to play with Italy’s most famous physical icons in-game, and learn about their most famous digital icons, in real life.

Italian gamers connect more with passion and personality than they do with flavour, form and function (Lavazza’s traditional comms approach). Aligning Lavazza with passionate Italian patriotism allowed us to position the brand as a national icon, alongside the likes of the Colosseum, Leaning Tower of Pisa etc. Establishing Italy’s most famous gamer, Pow3r, as a national icon in the physical world alongside these other icons provided the key brand link to gaming personalities.

Connecting meaningfully also meant aligning to this audience’s media consumption habits. An altruistic audience which is generally more unresponsive to traditional comms channels, and who utilise adblock wherever possible. The immersive nature of Fornite meant it was the platform that best allowed our target audience to drive their brand engagement on their own terms, rather than having it forced on them.

We built an icon-filled world within Fortnite bringing Italy’s most iconic landmarks into the digital space alongside the Lavazza brand and products, and opened this world to the Italian Fortnite community. Inside the map, users competed among each other in branded time trial challenges, varying game modes, and new and exciting areas released over 8 weeks.

We established Italian digital icon, Pow3r, as a physical icon in the real world through a branded full-length life-story documentary showcasing where he came from, how he got where he is, and what life as a gaming superstar is really like.

We captured the real emotions of Pow3r and his community live on-stream as he explored the Icons of Italy world, featured co-branded products, and even as he watched his personal documentary for the first time alongside his fans.

The outcome of the campaign was phenomenal success. Not only did it achieve 1.23m+ livestream views, a staggering 5.46m organic impressions across social media posts and 850k organic YouTube views but we also saw a vast amount of positive sentiment and praise from Pow3r’s community and Fnatic fans across the world. Following a pre/post campaign analysis, we discovered that over 80% of Fnatic fans felt more favourable towards Lavazza and overall there was a 3x uplift in brand preference.

Results:

Delivered over 1.2+ million live stream views

Delivered 850k+ organic views with branded video content - (450k above objective)

Achieved over 5.4+ million brand impressions (3.4m above objective)

Over 80% of Italian Fnatic Fans more favourable to Lavazza after the campaign

3x uplift in Lavazza brand preference