Long before any tactics or campaigns are even considered, I love to see marketers learning from the market. Then I like to see the subsequent insights that emerge from diagnosis feeding into a clear, simple strategy that fits the demands of the brand in question. And, finally, I love me a bit of creative, disruptive, distinctive execution that delivers the strategy with flair and impact and a whoosh of elan and impact.

And with Sheba’s 4am Stories I got it all. First there was the brilliant, but entirely accurate, insight that cats wake their owners in the middle of the night. Specifically, around 4am when they should be hunting and feeding they take it out on their sleeping owners in a very disruptive feline fashion. This wakes up the cat owner who then, invariably, turns to their phone for comfort and assistance in falling back to sleep. But as all of us know – YouTube is not always a comforting sleep partner. A lot of the content, especially if you let it play out while you doze, can end up waking you back up again.

So, Sheba went beyond the usual cliched catfood tropes of smiling cats and empty bowls, and designed material to help desperate cat owners get back to sleep. Sheba was not messing around with this stuff either, it consulted with sleep experts to create exactly the right kind of content. There was a Spotify sleep track, for example, and a five-hour YouTube video with a suitably smooth Francophone voiceover and nocturnal scenes of chickens and oil paintings to send people back to the land of Nod. Rather than me describe this madness, I strongly recommend a visit. You don’t need a cat for this amazing video to do the business.

The sleep video received more than 8 million views. In the first four nights of the campaign. Four nights! And the fact that 84% of these views occurred around 4am suggests that not only were cat owners awake at this time, but that the film was resonating and working for them. Outside of YouTube, the campaign utilised a host of other integrated channels like PR and social, to ensure other cat owners became aware of the endeavour and the availability of the sleep aid. The results created a 100% uplift in ad recall from a campaign that, thanks to targeting and clever content, did not cost the earth.

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