Awake Awareness Campaign

TAKING IT TO THE PEOPLE

Every fledgling brand eventually needs to leave—ahem—the nest with paid advertising. Although awareness on campuses—where their biggest fans lived—was pretty good, they needed a boost to take them to the next level and win legions of new fans.

A MESSAGE FOR A MULTI-TASKING GENERATION

AWAKE’s most ardent demographic—Millennials—take a lot of guff for being entitled snowflakes. But that’s not what research—and our experience—tells us. This cohort is extremely hardworking and seriously short on time. This led to our strategic insight that fits AWAKE’s main benefit perfectly: Energy to do more stuff.

GOOD PLANNING TAKES CONTENT FURTHER

“Energy to do more stuff” led to the question—what else would help you do more stuff? A series of 15 and 30 second spots humorously answered that question. The videos rolled out with paid media on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter targeted at key demographics. A slew of fun static and animated social content reinforced the awareness spots on AWAKE’s owned social channels.

With the campaign timed to fall between the start of school and Thanksgiving, we hit on another idea: AWAKE could hijack the end of Daylight Savings on November 6 and take credit for the longer day, giving these hard-sweating students one more way to do more stuff—a day with a whole extra hour. We called it The 25th Hour.

Early in the process, we identified the campaign’s key performance indicators—an essential step to creating content that drives results. One insight that came out of that early planning was the need to tell a comprehensive story before diving into the 25th Hour event, which led to a campaign cadence designed to build momentum over time.

Once the campaign was underway, we kept an eye on which assets did best each day and made adjustments to optimize ongoing content. This helped drive down cost-per-impression, since content that drives high engagement gets a boost in the automated auctions for appearing in the feeds of desired demographics.

HUZZAHS FOR EFFECTIVENESS

• Reached 90% of students at targeted schools
• 800k+ video views
• 700k+ post engagements
• Over 6 million impressions
• Sales increased by average of 17% during months campaign was running