NIVEA MEN is one of the leaders in male care product categories. Brand has a wide product range of deodorants, antiperspirants, shaving & after-shave products, shower gels & shampoos.

To keep its market share for multiple categories, brand struggles with numerous competitors. In Russia, main NIVEA MEN rivals are Gillette, Old Spice, Axe, Head & Shoulders & Arko. All main players have massive TV & digital media support during the whole year.

Thus, the brand can’t keep media investments at competitive level for all categories. Moreover, most competitors increase media budgets year to year. Inside male care categories, media mix is constantly changing, what results in high digital share of spends, growth of performance & in?uence marketing, and the latest trend of gaming & esports sponsorship.

The ordinary “con?dent and good looking” communication and especially ads of the stylish ULTRA product set were not quite something that gamers would appreciate.

Our communication developed specially for gamers is based on the psychology of the game process. What unites all players are symbols of achievement and superiority. Previously, there were high score ratings, now - all kinds of in-game achievements of any level - from a well-aimed shot to defeating all enemies in a row. The symbols of high achievements and cool gaming skills are important for gamers.

We researched their vocabulary and found that one of popular phrases “Ultra Kill” resonates with the ULTRA product line and rhymes with the widely used word “skill”.

ULTRA SKILL – a symbol of high game skills & new ad format on Twitch.

As first step we created the key asset of the campaign that would be appealing to gamers.

Next, we needed to introduce it to the audience. However, there was no visible format that could “praise” players' skills on Twitch.

What we found interesting was the existing model of supporting content creators (streamers) by their audience – "donations". This method of communication is widespread among gamers and a strong part of the communication culture. Donation notifications during the broadcast are more noticeable than any banner and the streamer's gratitude sounds more sincere than any sponsor's advertising text.

We found way to hack the format and turn a simple money transfer into branded communication format that was able to catch attention and engage streamers and their audience.

We took by surprise the gaming community, fought gamers’ indifference to brands, caught their attention and made communication truly entertaining and supporting their key interests.

We partnered with the DonationAlerts technology responsible for transactions and developed our own donation visualization, making it look like an in-game achievement. We watched broadcasts of dozens of popular streamers on Twitch, and sent branded donations on behalf of @niveamenultraskill, each time a player demonstrated an impressive skill.

Instead of the standard way of partnership with streamers: pay hundreds of thousands for a hardly visible banner and a lame verbal mention, we spent way less money and received the same coverage, but with higher attention and involvement of the streamer and the audience.

ULTRA SKILL awards that appeared after a cool moment in the game, coupled with an unexpectedly large donation surprised streamers, which was then followed by joy and gratitude coming from the realization of the brand inventiveness and recognition of cool gaming skills.

Our goal was to reach gaming audience and become accepted by them - we did it!

Activation reached more than 500K gamers.

We’ve spent 75% less compared to the possible cost of achieving the same coverage by standard streamers' integrations

High attention and engagement was confirmed by the survey (1):

1) 75% paid attention to NIVEA MEN in integrations in streams

2) 73% liked the ULTRA SKILL ad

3) 58% wanted to use NIVEA MEN ULTRA after viewing the donation

ULTRA SKILL has become a commonly used term among the covered audience and continues to spread among the gaming community.

Brand’s share in male care category grew up by 1.2 pp. as of 2020 year-end (2). Campaign results have shown that communication approach performed well and could be used further for future business growth.

(1) Study by OMI, Jun-Jul 2020

(2) Retail Audit data, Jan-Dec 2020