Prescribe The Nation
Issue 13 | December 2009
Agency
OgilvyOne
Creative Team
Creative Director:David Korchin, Art Director: Hyunsun Alex Cho, Copywriter: Anthony Whiteside, Web Developers: Hon-Chih Chin, Darian Trama Vitaliy Leokumovich
Other Credits
Marketing Director: Danielle Gontier
Date
From 2008
Background
Unilever wanted to launch a new prescription-strength moisturiser into the US market, Vaseline Clinical. Research showed that there were high levels of trust in the Vaseline brand so the challenge was how to turn existing brand fans into active brand spokespeople.
Part travelogue, part documentary, the campaign originated with BBH New York before OgilvyOne took it online creating a site which allowed the personal recommendation of one woman in Alaska to reach out to over 3 million other people across the United States.
Idea
The new product was launched in Kodiak, Alaska, a town where, if anyone needs a prescription-strength moisturiser, it’s the inhabitants.
Speech therapist Petal Ruch, aged 40, was the first person to recommend new Vaseline Clinical Therapy to her friends. And pretty soon they were recommending it to their friends. And their friends recommended it to theirs.
Along the way, hundreds of videos and photos were captured of different people signing up to VCT and passing on their own approvals.
The commercial realities weren’t hidden either, the site also documenting the 19-day shoot in the community and the director’s tribute to the townspeople’s kindness.
On the site also a live counter tracked the progress of ‘prescriptions’ across the nation as more and more people recommended Vaseline CT to their friends.
Results
Sales greatly increased during the Prescribe the Nation campaign.
A total number of site visits of 671,587 were achieved. The total number of ‘prescriptions’ across the nation is over 3,010,1414 with total number of eCards and prescriptions from the site at over 152,824.
Engagement was high with an average site time of over 2:30 minutes per visit.
Over 24,000 e-Coupons for $1 off were downloaded from the site for trial purchases.
Our Thoughts
Is this sales promotion, is this direct marketing, is this brand communication? The answer is yes.
If you want an example of how direct marketing is changing, study this campaign (and RNLI and HBO in this issue as well).
What I love about this is when the team went up to Alaska, no-one had the faintest idea if it would work or not. The fact that it did owes a lot to the bottle of client Steve Miles (who was once my client too) who backed his own judgement rather than fall back on tried-and-trusted TV (and outdoor) as launch media. Marketing is an art, not a science.