The new Danone yoghurt brand Light & Free was recently launched in Belgium. The brand wants to give Millennials a platform to express themselves freely.

To build brand awareness around this, different brand activations are set in place. In this case Light & Free gave consumers the opportunity to express themselves by voting their favourite of three new flavours into stores.

The objectives were clear: further build brand awareness and engage Millennials to express themselves through votes.

The challenge? Why would Millennials be interested in a new flavour of a yoghurt brand most of them never even heard of? And how do they choose for a flavour that they cannot taste?

We let people taste with their ears with the help of Annie. She has Synesthesia, a rare neurological condition where the stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers another sense. In Annie’s case it means that she can taste sound.

With the help of a composer and a musician, we asked Annie to translate the three yoghurt flavours into audio taste samples. This gave people the opportunity to get a taste of the yoghurts (with their ears) and vote the one that sounded best into stores.

We kicked-off the social media campaign with the help of influencers and in a mini-documentary we shared the creation process of the audio taste samples.

Through an integrated social media campaign, consumers could vote for the flavour that sounded best on their preferred platform (Instagram, Facebook or Light & Free website), using all the tools social media can offer to create engagement.

We needed to create interest for the brand among Millennials. We know that they have already seen many similar campaigns and that they don’t like marketing tricks. That’s why we can’t get their attention easily. We also know that Millennials crave for authenticity and that they have multiple passion points, an important one is music. And as Simon Sinek brilliantly explained, every Millennial believes he is unique – because that’s how that generation was raised.

To deliver authenticity, we found Annie: a unique Millennial thanks to her ‘gift’: Synesthesia. She’s the perfect role model to develop our strong storytelling and inspire our audience. Annie helped us get closer to Millennials’ interests by translating our yoghurt flavours into music. And the mini-documentary we realized was perfect to immerse our audience into Annie’s special gift.

To increase credibility, we worked together with the UK Synaesthesia Association during the development.

The campaign consisted of 3 different phases:

Phase 1 (10/2 - 6/3) - Vote your favourite flavour into stores

Taste the flavours with your ears and discover how we translated the different flavours into music with the help of Annie.

Placement: Instagram polls, Facebook carrousel post, Influencer marketing, online video, TVC tag-on, voting platform (Light & Free website), offline voting app.

Phase 2 (23/3 - 18/4) - Synesthesia content

Discover more about Synesthesia, how it works and how Annie experiences it.

During the production phase of the new flavour, it was important to keep the Millennials entertained with extra content.

Placement: Instagram Stories, Instagram Feed, Facebook feed.

Phase 3 (25/5 - 28/6) - Discover the new flavour in store

The reveal of the winning flavour and the invitation to taste it with your mouth.

Placement: Instagram stories, Instagram feed, Facebook feed, online video.

The campaign resulted in an auditive sampling experience building brand awareness & engagenemt for Light & Free. Its strong storytelling and its authenticity received more than positive feed-back among the critical Millennials. With an engagement rate (poll rate) 2,5 higher than the average Danone campagne, it activated 73.000 people to vote for their favorite flavour and had a total reach of 2 million media impressions