Cannes Lions

Lipton Iced Tea: Summer, Through a New Lens

PHD, Sydney / LIPTON / 2024

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Overview

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OVERVIEW

Background

Lipton Iced Tea faced the challenge of increasing brand awareness and consideration among 18-24-year-old Australians in a highly competitive beverage market. Despite being a well-known brand, Lipton was not the most top-of-mind choice for refreshment, particularly during the summer months when young consumers sought out new and exciting experiences.

To grow the brand and establish a stronger connection with their target audience, Lipton needed to find a way to leverage their distinctive brand assets and associate them with the quintessential Australian summer. The vibrant colour of Lipton Iced Tea, a unique characteristic compared to other beverages in the market, presented an opportunity to amplify brand recognition and recall.

Lipton identified festivals as a key summer touchpoint for young Australians and saw the potential to create a multi-sensory brand experience that would showcase the refreshing qualities of their product while tapping into the cultural relevance of these events.

Idea

The creative idea behind Lipton's "Share Some Sunshine" campaign centred around the insight that the brand could transform its distinctive colour – the vibrant hue of Lipton Iced Tea – into a physical medium that would allow consumers to experience summer through the brand’s lens.

Recognizing the colour of Lipton Iced Tea was not only visually appealing but evocative of the refreshing, sun-drenched moments that define Australian summer, the brand sought to create a tangible representation of this association. The idea was to collaborate with an eyewear brand to produce limited-edition, "tea-tinted" sunglasses that serve as a wearable embodiment of the Lipton experience.

By distributing sunglasses via influencers and guerilla marketing, we encouraged consumers to share their experiences on social media. Lipton aimed to create a viral effect that would amplify brand exposure and foster a deeper emotional connection between the product and the carefree, joyful spirit of Australian summer.

Strategy

Lipton's campaign strategy focused on leveraging partnerships and creative activations to establish a strong brand presence during the key summer festival season, targeting 18-24-year-old Australians.

Central to this strategy was the Pared Sunglasses collaboration to create limited-edition "tea-tinted" sunglasses. These sunglasses would serve as a new media canvas, allowing festivalgoers to experience the highlights of Summer through the colour of Lipton Iced Tea. By distributing the sunglasses via influencers on-site and encouraging attendees to share their experiences on social media, Lipton aimed to create a viral effect to extend the campaign's reach beyond the festivals.

To maximize the sunglasses' impact and drive product trial, Lipton secured partnerships with festivals like Laneway, creating immersive on-site activations with product sampling, refreshing experiences, and branded giveaways. Activations were amplified through influencer partnerships, paid media, and PR, ensuring that the "Share Some Sunshine" message reached a wide audience both on the ground and online.

Execution

Influencers seeded Lipton’s "tea-tinted" sunglasses at major summer festivals, including Laneway, where Lipton secured a presence as the official light refreshment partner. Becoming a must-have accessory that festival-goers eagerly shared on their social media channels.

To further amplify the campaign, Lipton partnered with influential Instagram and TikTok creators who developed content featuring the sunglasses and the overall brand experience. This content was then promoted through paid media partnerships, extending the campaign's reach to a broader audience of young Australians.

The brand collaboration was also launched across Pared's own digital channels, leveraging their existing audience to drive additional awareness and engagement.

The campaign was supported by extensive press coverage and strategic partnerships with lifestyle publications such as Rolling Stone and The Brag, cementing Lipton's position as the ultimate refreshment brand for the Australian summer.

Outcome

Across multiple touchpoints, our paid media campaign reached 1.4m Australians throughout the Summer.

Beyond the reach of the paid activation, the strategic partnerships and influencer collaborations generated substantial organic reach, with over 250,000 people engaged through influencer content.

The campaign drove impressive sales growth, with Lipton achieving a 17% increase in product sales compared to the previous year.

Brand perception also saw significant improvement, with Lipton moving from 5th to 2nd place in the Kantar Brand Report within the target 18-24 demographic.

Highlighting the power of creating a unique collaboration and new product development to convey the distinctive asset of the brand - and then using this as the core of a summer marketing campaign across social influencer and distribution channels in order to get achieve the levels of reach needed to have the marketing impact it did.

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