AXE Hair brand decides to launch an app to promote a new product. The app was designed as a “First Impressions Basics” textbook launched just before school year started.

The agency decided to use one of the most certain facts of life – what’s forbidden is desired. When it comes to teenagers, that fact is accompanied by a strong booster – what’s forbidden by your mom is desired beyond belief.

The agency creates a Mother, who writes a petition on a government website where she addresses The Ministry of education and science of Russia with a request to stop the release of AXE’s distorted mobile app. The Mother starts a vast agitation over the Internet to acquire the most signatures. She writes posts all over the web, telling everyone how the app content is a debauchery children simply can not get their hands on.

Throughout the agitation bloggers, opinion-leaders and popular social media users divided in two – some were outraged, some wanted children to learn how to deal with the opposite sex.

Teenagers got curious about the heated discussion and within the first couple of days the app rose to the Top20.

The response was huge – over 10 000 users took active part in the discussion.

The objective was to cause public despair, make the app scandalous and put it under discussion with no costs for media tools. The agency managed to use just the necessary PR tools to create a hot topic and reasons for the public to go wild.

The campaign started with a petition placed on the open source change.org signed by the Mother addressed to Russian ministry of education with a request to stop the launch of the perverted AXE app.

Further on, she starts a vast agitation using social networks. She addresses individual users and communities with a cry for help in preventing the debauchery.

Within the first week the petition gathered 2500 signatures and became a matter of discussion. Some consider the matter an outrage, some are certain that the Mother is a prude. Nonetheless, within two weeks 4000 signatures were gathered.

At the same time, popular social networks users drive in. A popular vlog user with over 300 000 followers signs the petition in public. The leader of a community fighting for child protection agitates his followers to fight. Russian top-bloggers mock the Mother.

When the app came out it instantly got to Top20.

Total coverage of the petition was 30 million users, and 10 000 of them took part in the discussion. More than 30% of the audience shared the news with their followers.

Users aged from 14 to 25 who commented on the matter divided into four: 7% were sympathetic to the Mother and wanted to help, 8% were strongly against the app, 14% were neutral and just curious to what was happening, 61% were negatively rooting against the author of the petition and curious to finding out what exactly was the content in the app. Thus, the TA showed the predicted interest in something forbidden by adults.

The most important results reached were the rise of the app into the Russian AppStore entertainment category Top10 and the Top100 of the CIS.

According to statistics most of the downloads were made by the target audience being men at the age of 13 to 24.