Love in Action

Background

Lacta is a leading chocolate bar in Greece. At the heart of all its brand communication there has always been the concept of love. The most recent TV commercials were essentially 30-second love stories, which the core target group, women 18-24, loved.

The challenge was to extend the ‘love story’ concept to movie length by getting the target audience to share their own love stories, which would then be turned into a screenplay and, finally, into a movie.

Idea

The campaign launched with a series of TV spots inviting people to submit their personal love stories to the Lacta website. The hope was that around 100 people might share their stories but in the end some 1,307 love stories were uploaded.

After a month of reading and shortlisting all the entries, the top five stories were judged by a committee comprising the client, the agency and a famous Greek screenwriter.

The winning story was about a musician and a new recruit to the army, who meet on a train journey.

Now visitors to the website were invited to help make the crucial decisions about casting and wardrobe. Who should play the lead roles? What should they wear?

The screen tests were posted up and visitors invited to vote.

A total of 11,500 people registered and voted and some were invited to be extras in the film. Updates were posted on Facebook and Twitter as well as on the campaign blog during the two-week shoot, while daily ‘making-of’ videos were uploaded on YouTube and to photo galleries on Flickr.

Results

The plan was to run the resulting 27-minute film online but there was such buzz surrounding it that the country's leading TV station, MEGA Channel, offered to screen it free on February 14th as part of its Valentine's Day programming.

It attracted a 12% share of viewers and was seen by more than 335,000 Greeks. In its first months online, the film has been viewed 230.000 times by 8% of Greece’s Internet population, attracting more than 28,000 fans on Facebook.

Even the song the agency commissioned for the film featured became a hit.

The campaign ran at a difficult time for Lacta. Greece's warm winter was bad for chocolate sales but the campaign helped to raise sales by 0.6% in a market that was down by 4.3%.

In tracking studies, unaided recall of the brand increased +5% and top-of-mind awareness was up +8%.

Our Thoughts

If anyone ever wanted proof that the world of advertising has changed, here it is. For starters it’s a ‘below-the-line’ agency making the half-hour TV drama; it uses crowd sourcing to find the script and many of the extras as well as getting website visitors actively participating in production decisions; it is a brilliant example of brand-building but it doesn’t use the traditional brand-building medium of TV advertising; and it comes from Greece, often regarded as one of the hotbeds of advertising creativity, until now.

Just think, when the team started they had no idea if they would get a story; no idea who was going to star in it; not the faintest suspicion they would get it on to terrestrial TV.

What they did was to start. With optimisim, with enthusiasm, with a client who believed in the idea. Bravo!