ASIA-PACIFIC – SINGAPORE, JUNE 27, 2013 – Following 19 Cannes Lions awards for the Dove Real Beauty Sketches campaign, Unilever’s media agency PHD has said the wins prove testament to the investment in its dedicated global communications planning unit, launched at the start of the year.
PHD’s Global Communications Planning Unit in London and Singapore was central to the paid media strategy for the campaign.
It picked up awards across the board including the Grand Prix for Titanium, a Gold Lion for Titanium & Integrated and Gold for Media, Best Use of Social Media as well as 16 others in a range of categories from Media to Cyber.
PHD innovation director Joel Pearson said, “Crucial to our strategy working globally was the ability to be nimble, responsive and operate centrally. Our global control centre enabled real-time monitoring, optimisation and response to media performance, conversations, sentiment and content distribution.”
PHD’s global partnership with YouTube allowed the campaign to be bought and optimized centrally across 18 markets in real time, with input and buy in from a core team of media, agency and client representatives working out of the Dove HQ Command Centre. It enabled the creation of additional creative assets for use across owned platforms based on the core topics of conversation as they emerged and was supported by Facebook, Twitter, local market activity and a global PR strategy.
Fernando Machado, global brand development VP Dove Skin at Unilever, speaking at the Cannes Lions festival said: “It wasn’t like anything we had ever seen with a regular TV campaign. We knew that we had something special with Dove ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ but didn’t just wait around for the magic to happen. Strategically, we felt that the film would reach the most scale on YouTube and quickly put a clever paid media strategy in place to increase exposure of the campaign. We worked nimbly and broke every rule in the Unilever book on how to deploy campaigns. As a result, we were able to ride the wave of interest and scale the campaign globally.”
The approach with YouTube’s TrueView product – enabling Unilever to pay only once a user had decided to not to skip and then watch at least 30 seconds of the 3-minute film – supported and drove reach for content that was already strong enough to really resonate and connect emotionally with consumers, resulting in highly efficient scale.
“All activity was monitored daily, and activity was optimised against cost, interaction and engagement, market penetration, and pace of delivery – ensuring that Dove Real Beauty Sketches was being seen by the right people, in the right place, at the right time” continued Pearson.
