Creative Planning Awards
1997
Tel: +44 (0)181 444 3692 Fax: +44 (0)181 883 9953
|
Creative Planning Awards |
1997 |
| Account Planning Group, 16 Creighton Avenue, London N10 1NU, UK Tel: +44 (0)181 444 3692 Fax: +44 (0)181 883 9953 |
| Agency: | Author: Joffy Conolly |
In 1996, Procter & Gamble came to Euro RSCG with a challenge – to build a relationship between Clearasil and teenagers by talking to them about spots.
Through a thorough understanding of teenagers and, in particular the way that they relate to their media, planning inspired the creation of a punchy, informative campaign 'with attitude', and demonstrated that it is possible to make teenagers want to read about pustules.
Clearasil is the brand leader in the teen skincare market, and after 25 years has a rich brand heritage. Traditionally, brand communications have been focused around its core strength of efficacy. However, the entry of Johnson's Clean & Clear in the market, with its emphasis on skincare rather than spotcare, had caused it to start losing market share – particularly among older girls to whom Clean & Clear was aggressively marketed.
The brief from P&G was to reinvigorate the lotion side of Clearasil, and by extension the brand itself. Lotion is their lead variant aimed at girls, and the lotion category as a whole is overwhelmingly female. In addition, market data told us that girls predominantly suffer from acne between the ages of 12 and 17.
On this basis, our initial thought was that this meant a communications target near the top of the 12-17 age range, as we assumed that teenagers aspire to those older than themselves. Fortunately however, the subsequent planning insight allowed us to tackle this targeting problem in a more imaginative manner.
We began by looking at how girls viewed and used teen skincare products; using a variety of research resources to uncover their current behaviour and beliefs. The results gave some indication of the scale of the task ahead.
In 1986 the Royal Commission on Prison Reform finally submitted its report after two long years of research. In it they examined every possible method of crime deterrent from prison to community work. Its conclusion? 'Nothing works'.
This, we discovered, was also what 12-17 year old girls believed with respect to teen skincare products! Although this could easily have dampened our enthusiasm, we decided to delve deeper and found that:
These learnings helped us to overcome the main barrier to entry - that nothing worked, but what about the core benefit itself ? Once we could get girls to consider a skincare product, what did they want it to do for them?
To answer this question we conducted some 'teen panels' to look at the 'relationship' (if that is the right word) that girls have with spots, and what part they play in their lives. These panels consisted of group discussions in informal settings with no set agenda. We gave the girls free rein to talk about their daily lives: their problems, hopes & fears.
Unsurprisingly, zits were seen as one of the least palatable parts of growing up. It emerged that girls view spots in much the same way as they do their fathers: (just) bearable at home, deeply embarrassing when they are with friends, and capable of ruining any chance of them pulling down at the school disco. Spots particularly depress them because girls are chiefly outer-directed – their self-confidence is largely based on how they look. Therefore, what motivates them above all is the result: clear, spot-free skin.
Drawing this information together, it was clear that any communication had to have a key message at its core: we needed to educate our target that using Clearasil lotion daily helped achieve clear spot-free skin.
So why didn't we stop there? After all, we had identified what we needed to communicate. The question though remained how. The problem was not the message itself, but its delivery, and the challenge was to choose a medium and adopt a tone of voice that delivered this core message in a credible and involving way.
The obvious solution was to create a TV campaign. The category predominantly used TV, and we were looking for more than just a product benefit ad – TV offered all the possibilities of high impact, sound and movement that could be exploited to bring this message to life.
The Clearasil 'sisters' TV execution was already running, and conveyed very successfully the rational product benefits of Clearasil. However, while this was great as a generic Clearasil message to a wider audience, it was less effective on specific targets.
What we needed was to develop an emotional relationship specifically between 12-17 year-old girls and Clearasil that then gave us permission to talk to them about the rational side.
We concluded that TV was not flexible enough to achieve our goals as:
Going back to our teen panel research for inspiration, we discovered that girls have a very special relationship with magazines. For them, 'their' magazine is a bible about growing up. It understands them, gives them relevant information, and most importantly talks their language.
This is their own private world away from mum and boys, and the choice of title is driven by which magazine is perceived to most accurately understand and relate to their particular life stage.
Ultimately, magazines play a very important part in girls' lives – we found that most girls read five a week!
This led to our key strategic insight. Since these magazines were so successful at building a relationship with girls, Clearasil must embrace the same values.
Placing our campaign within this intimate world, we could create a relationship and an environment which allowed us to put across our key message, in a way that made them want to read on – the medium would validate the advertising.
This was confirmed in our later creative development research which concluded that 'the effectiveness of particular advertising is dependent on similar criteria to that of the magazines themselves ie their empathetic value'.
In addition, because each magazine was chosen by lifestage, by emulating each individual style we could produce different executions that spoke to different age subsegments.
In short, we resolved that we needed to blend in yet stand out within girls' magazines – in a sense become a fascinating 'advertorial'.
While we wanted to use the same language as the magazines, and make the executions as much a part of the magazine as possible, we realised that standout in this cluttered environment was also necessary.
Although we now had the insight that would get our advertising read, we wanted girls to turn to it first. This meant it being impactful enough to be caught when the reader first flicks through a magazine, before settling down to read in detail.
Our final steer came from:
It became clear that today's 'post-feminist' teenage girl is more confident than ever. The release of the Spice Girls' first single merely confirmed that there was a strong and growing 'girl power' attitude among girls that we could tap into. Here was a tone of voice that was distinctive, topical and attention grabbing.
In fact since spots were seen as one of the main barriers to self-confidence the opportunity was even greater. Taking a bold, sassy confident tone enabled us to:
Briefing the creatives meant getting them to live, breathe and love their target. It was crucial that they appreciate the magazine environment, so with the brief we handed over a three foot high stack of magazines, and they were encouraged to imagine themselves as editors.
In addition:
Above all, we emphasised a sense of 'girl power' as personified by the Spice Girls (or at least their promoter!).
The team presented us with five executions aimed at various life stages, among them 'Cow', 'GCSE' and 'Pubes' – reflecting the word that stood out most in each execution.
The work exceeded even our own expectations as to its boldness (it is not everyday you are presented with the word 'penis' covering half the page), so we set up 'confession sessions', to test just how far we could go.
To reflect our innovative work, these sessions used paired depths to allow us to explore the potential embarrassment/shock of the ads without the pressure of a large peer group. Creating an intimate atmosphere at the sessions allowed us to really understand how the ads worked, and how far we could go with each target subgroup.
Further learnings allowed us to refine the executions:
This allowed us to recommend a media schedule to our client that maximised the synergy of each execution with a particular audience.
We were able to inspire some truly memorable advertising, and deliver it efficiently and effectively, by:
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