Everything about Laundry Night was designed to create a direct reaction from the audience. From turning laundry into an immediate trending topic by pitting the NFL vs NBC, to the specially designed Tuesday Tide PODS that NFL fans could win by joining the debate and using our hashtag. Right away, consumers weighed in online, discussing their laundry habits three times more frequently than before, making #LaundryNight and its custom Tide emoji the official hashtag of laundry in general with 12 million engagements nationwide.

Tide has been the leading laundry detergent for over 70 years, but detergent is a low involvement category, where the specter of commoditization looms large. The role and power of brands is constantly under attack from aggressive price promotions and look alike claims. Add to that the fact that Tide costs twice as much as its closest competitor even when they aren’t offering deep discounts. To build emotional affinity, the brand is always looking for opportunities to connect with people in culturally relevant, meaningful ways. This is where the NFL comes in. Aside from the Super Bowl itself, NFL games consistently top the list of most watched TV programming in the country. The NFL engenders fearsome loyalty—people schedule their entire Sundays around the games. Our objective was to get people to engage with a laundry detergent during the NFL season.

Data (and common sense) showed that Sunday was the most popular day to do laundry, with 200MM loads done every Sunday. During football season, we knew Sunday was for watching hours worth of games. Combining these two proof points gave us a real, quantifiable tension that became the anchor of the Laundy Night campaign.

From there, we created the biggest crossover episode viewers never knew they needed - all during commercial breaks. Instead of treating the NFL and NBC as distinct entities, we created one big universe containing all their characters. Then we pitted them against each other to answer one simple question—what’s the best night of the week for laundry? In declaring an “official” Laundry Night, we got consumers to discuss their laundry habits and further engaged them by branching out to different fandoms for The Voice, Superstore, Saturday Night Live, and even Days of Our Lives.

Since everyone does laundry, our target audience was broad, but we wanted to appeal to them in a way that made laundry exciting: through their favorite TV and NFL characters. To do so, we chose programs that hit every segment of people, from young to old, urban to suburban and more. The overarching media goal was to ensure Americans saw a piece of this campaign wherever they looked, from NFL games, to soap operas, on their Twitter feeds, Snap stories, or even in a WWE twitter thread. The massive scale of the campaign was necessary to break through the noise and educate the public about this debate, and it was successful, with Tide being mentioned five times more than any other brand through the flight of the campaign and 12 million engagements with #LaundryNight as people joined the debate and shared their laundry habits with the world.

We created a month-long debate over Laundry Night by pitting the NFL against NBC, America’s most iconic TV network— using the pop culture footprint of six different shows to shift the conversation form football to laundry. Week after week, different celebrities and players reacted to which night should be Laundry Night, from an official announcement from Peyton Manning, to a rap comeback by SNL’s Kenan Thompson and Melissa Villasenor. The NFL fired back with exclusive tubs of “Tuesday Tide” to further encourage viewers not to do laundry on Sunday. The debate raged on for another two weeks, both on broadcast and social media, with everyone from soap opera legends to WWE superstars weighing in.

Over the course of the campaign, Laundry Night garnered a total of 374 million earned media impressions across 75 pieces of media coverage. On social, fans didn’t just see the campaign, but interacted with it, making #LaundryNight the official hashtag of laundry - a topic that was immediately discussed 3x more than before with a 90% positive sentiment. Importantly, Tide was mentioned in the discussion 5x more than any other brand during Sunday Night Football, ensuring brand recognition and a 47% increase in sales.