Saturday, January 17, 2009

Powerade "Never Give Up" Campaign

Agency: Cybercom Ireland

Client: Coca-Cola

Brief: Drive sales through re-positioning

-------------------------------------------------------------------




Background

The problem here was that Powerade was only positioned third in the lucrative sports drink market in Ireland. Coca-Cola decided on a technique which involved a viral campagin, which was to act as a 'channel for following'. The idea of this campaign was to follow 22 year old Will Cullen through his first triatholon.





Creative Execution

The creative execution behind the campaign was

A series of viral videos

A blog http://www.bebo.com/nevergiveup

Social media communities

Online PR http://www.nevergiveup.ie/

Banner advertisments

This was backed up by a series of television advertisements which were comprised of mini documentaries, following the progress of Will Cullen.





Results

Year 1:

43,000 separate consumers visited NeverGiveUp.ie
21,116 viewed The Powerade TV ads on YouTube, Bebo or My Space
The client measured a 625% return on investment from digital

Year 2:

Powerade recorded a 24% increase in sales in 2008
Powerade has increased its market share by 6% to 27.5% market share
Online Advertising drove a total of 7,685 visitors through to the website



7 comments:

  1. I think this is a fantastic campaign online, backed up by TV advertising, I think partly the reason it worked is because of the young target audience that are technically minded, would it have worked on an older target audience? I think there is a definate shift to online, although the spend in Ireland on online is still relaively low. Check out the article below; "Is the future of TV online"?

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think this was a brave step by Powerade considering that Will was more or less starting from scratch however, it did inspire people to reach an end goal. I did notice that the campaign was backed up by a TV campaign as well as posters and bus side ads and ads in gyms all over the country. How did Coca Cola measure the effectiveness of the Digital element of the campaign?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well its hard to account for the digital element of the campaign and to what extent it contributed to the overall success of the campaign, but it without doubt played an integral role. We'l see more of this in the future no doubt.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Nice post. Some stats from the digital element for the Will Cullen 'Never Give Up' campaign are 40,000 + visits to the website, and the Paul O'Connell Viral message http://www.nevergiveup.ie/video/
    was sent to 25,000 people during the campaign. The third Never Give Up campaign is about to kick off soon.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks Richie for those extra stats, the idea is that we post a new creative campaign up here every two weeks. Il add that Paul O'Connell viral message in. Such campagins seem to be the future of marketing whereby there is community involvement. We would appreciate if you would become a follower of this blog, and we will return the favour if you have one. Sarah and Conor

    ReplyDelete