Insight
Axe has been losing its coolness because the younger generation doesn’t identify with the traditional “Axe guy”. This new audience is highly diverse and needs to be touched instead of reached.
Therefore, the masculine personalities are now shifting and distancing away from an established stereotype, which once was successful for Axe. This trend put the brand into a two-year cycle of decreasing brand perception and a consequent drop in market share. In such a diverse scenario, it is impossible to be accurate in grouping the audience to deliver one single effective message.
Therefore the brand needed to create a campaign in order to make Axe get back its past market share through an efficient personalised communication to the various new masculine personalities.
Strategy
Through qualitative research, Cadreon identified four main new masculine consumer profiles, baptised as - artsy, fresh, roots or natural - based on their major life friction, passion points and feelings towards the deodorant category. It invited four movie directors to translate William Shakespeare Romeo’s story to better relate to the complex archetypes of the contemporary men. It challenged them to do a Romeo Reboot.
Once the four diverse pieces of cinematic branded content were created, this was just the beginning. The agency still had to find the audience and group them into these clusters to be effective on the message distribution.
It crossed the qualitative research findings with audience tools and found a universe of 13 million men online. Then it used programmatic audience management tools that analyse a user's digital behaviour to discover a complex net of interests and identify patterns.
This audience was exposed to the proprietary technology, a creative generator tool that put scenes together based on consumers’ behaviour profile and auto tagged itself to display a one minute video in programmatic media.
These thousands of videos served as a test in order to understand which short film the agency should deliver to each user in the next phase of the campaign. If a viewer has an artsy persona, the storytelling engine would automatically choose scenes from the films with an artsier approach and create a new video with the soundtrack of the film that best fits this profile. Same thing would happen if it identified that the viewer has a flirting persona, the video created will have more romantic scenes and soundtrack accordingly.
Execution
With over 100,000 videos created and the audience data in hands, Cadreon was able to understand which short film it should deliver to each user in the live campaign phase. To do this crossing, it developed algorithms that understand the different variations in each trailer; identifying which elements they contain and match it with the audience data to deliver a specific video to each type of user. Besides, if consumers watched the short video until the end, they were retargeted for the longer version with a deeper message.
In summary, "Romeo Reboot" appealed to technology, creating a software tool that builds a narrative structure, taking scenes from four main movies each reframing one of the greatest male characters of literature - and alluding to a new consumer profile. Programmatic buying puts it all together in a different way every time, balancing according to different interest and behaviours of a wide range of Axe audiences.
Results
Since the content created was extremely precisely placed for each type of consumer, not only did it achieve 27 million views reaching with quality 81% of the target audience, but it had an unprecedented retention rate - 170% higher than any other campaign asset aired by AXE ever before.
When it comes to business results, AXE Anti Perspirant reverted the negative trend and already showed incredible results in modern trade +90bps SOM gain and a TT of +30bps. The campaign also increased the brand Cool and Trendy attribute, from 28% to 51% therefore bringing back the lost coolness it needed.
It was the first time a high end Hollywood style production was created and delivered totally automated, starting a new era for the no turning back trend of hyper customised content. More than 100,000 videos were dynamically generated, targeted and published programmatically at large scale.