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GOLD OGILVY WINNER: MOBILE
ADVERTISER: Advil – Pfizer Consumer Healthcare
AGENCIES: Grey New York, Tribal Worldwide
RESEARCH: GFK Brainjuicer, Forbes Consulting (now Isobar), Disruptyx (now Newsristics), Firefly Millward Brown, Kantar Millward Brown, and The Sound
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MARKETING CHALLENGE
Advil is the top-selling brand in the $3.5 billion over-the-counter pain reliever category.1 But in 2014, sales and household penetration were declining and Advil was losing its leadership equity. Advil was struggling with a lack of identity among consumers who viewed it to be substitutable with its generic, store brand counterpart. To positively differentiate itself, command a price premium (versus store brands), and grow the business, Advil needed to strengthen its emotional connection with consumers with a memorable new campaign.
METHODOLOGY
The campaign would be informed by findings and results from quantitative studies, mobile video diaries, in-home immersions, and a heuristics-based analysis. The research was based on a consumer-centric approach that focused on how consumers think and live their daily lives in the presence of pain. Among the findings:
- "Functional attributes are correlated to, and ladder up to, key emotional benefits." This was revealed through brand equity tracking.
- "Although pain plays a big role in people's lives, our consumers choose to defy the pain." This was revealed from qualitative consumer immersions—online community boards, mobile video diaries, in-home interviews and shop-alongs—video-taped in a story-telling format.
- "There are unspoken drivers of decision making in this category." Heuristics-based studies on drivers of behavior informed the thinking behind 200 new campaign idea concepts.
- "Advil had consumers' permission to engage in a much more emotional way." Forty campaign ideas were quantitatively tested and ranked, using prediction-markets and crowd-wisdom research methods that provided insights about the emotional strength of each idea.
- "The power of an idea was rooted in its simplicity." In a qualitative-quantitative study, "Distant Memory" consistently won praise. Consumers smiled and laughed, describing the execution as pithy, memorable, telepathic and the sentiment (defiance toward pain) they wanted to exude to their social circle. This was the break-through moment.
CREATIVE EXECUTION AND RESULTS
In its final copy test validation, Advil's "Distant Memory" campaign successfully delivered on all the necessary measures to drive emotional connection with viewers. With an upbeat pace and lively and invigorating music, it features various everyday people doing extraordinary things—from an elderly woman doing yoga on her hands to a man breakdancing on his wrists. A voice-over states, "With Advil, you'll ask, 'What backache? What sore wrist?... Advil makes pain a distant memory."
The campaign launched across television, print, digital social, and in-store platforms. Mobile was a key component. Thumb-stopping videos posted on Facebook showcased exhilarating moments in life when pain is a distant memory. In 2016, "Distant Memory" was the Advil's first Super Bowl television commercial since 1992. Aware that its target consumer over-indexes on social media and would have his or her mobile device during the game, Advil set up a newsroom for live Tweeting.
Among the results, brand tracking showed significant gains across key metrics. And within six months of the launch, Advil sales rose by 3 percent, outpacing the category performance. Its buy rate rose 8 percent versus the prior year, while store brands fell 3 percent. Marketing mix analysis showed increases in incremental sales volume and television effectiveness, with digital efforts driving a 24 percent increase in both effectiveness and return on investment.
1. Statista. "Annual sales of the leading OTC pain relief products in the United States in July 2014, in millions of dollars."↩