ROCKWOOL’s corporate brand narrative was deemed to have alienated their core audience of craftsmen, architects, engineers and real estate developers in construction. They’re a technically minded audience who look for communications that speak their language and for reassurance that they’re selecting the best materials.

In a highly commoditised market, we needed to improve brand competitiveness and resonance, by raising awareness and knowledge of ROCKWOOL’s product differentiators, ‘The 7 Strengths of Stone’ – helping to build brand fame, affinity and engagement amongst its core audiences in the construction industry. Here was the story of a company which had engineering and product innovation at its heart.

MARKETING OBJECTIVE: Drive brand fame through highly creative, more culturally relevant communications.

COMMUNICATION OBJECTIVE: Improve competitiveness and resonance, through engagement and knowledge of our product differentiators.

COMMERCIAL OBJECTIVE: Increase efficiency of our ROI (vs. previous campaigns and vs. industry competition).

We created a Bond-style ‘test lab’ at the ROCKWOOL Innovation Factory in Copenhagen, casting the Head of R&D as our lead ‘Q’ character to conduct a series of extreme live product tests that would entertain with a light touch of wry Scandinavian humour.

The test lab ensured the films would be grounded in a scientific and technical world, with a message of innovation at the heart of the creative platform.

The scripts also featured board-level ROCKWOOL executives, who got behind the campaign – putting themselves on the line in the films to communicate the pride, passion and confidence they have in their products. This included the Head of Insulation putting his classic 1980 VW Beetle on the line in the fire resilience test, and the CMO sitting under a makeshift umbrella made out of ROCKWOOL whilst having 1.5 tonnes of water dropped above her head to test ‘water repellent properties.'

In a sector cemented in rational and technical product information, we wanted to be bold and go against the grain with a series of entertaining and extreme product tests that would bring ROCKWOOL’s endless focus on product innovation to life. And by celebrating its Danish heritage we knew we could continue a trend created by brands such as IKEA, Lego and Volvo which has made Scandinavian brands synonymous with product innovation.

ROCKWOOL is truly remarkable in its capability and performance which gave us rich creative territory to push the boundaries. It’s fire resilient to over 1000 degrees Celsius. When engineered to absorb water, it helps farmers produce crops using 75% less water. Across the board, the ‘7 Strengths of Stone’ are extraordinary, so our strategy, and the role of creativity, was to tell a series of stories that would dramatise these capabilities; excite and surprise. After all, seeing is believing.

Drilling into each of the 7 Strengths, it was clear that there were amazing stories to be told. And to do them justice, we would need to use longer-form content that would be highly engaging to tell the full story of each while bringing to life ROCKWOOL’s endless focus on product innovation.

To win ‘share of time’ with our audience on platforms where they predominantly go to be entertained, we needed to create ‘brand entertainment’ – content worthy of holding their attention.

It was clear that social channels would have the strongest role to play in creating authentic brand engagement. Our content distribution strategy was based on using owned social media at the core of the channel mix with the films promoted on ROCKWOOL’s Facebook and Instagram platforms. We needed to capitalise on engagement and turn it into product interest by driving audiences to product content on the ROCKWOOL website.

Bolder work paid dividends as the campaign saw unprecedented levels of engagement, causing the ROCKWOOL website to crash due to the volume of traffic generated and increasing the company’s Facebook following by 26% in the first 3 months.

Facebook post engagement was 30.7%, 1435% higher than the average rate of 2%. And with Facebook’s algorithm rewarding content engagement, our CPV dropped from €0.31 to €0.05, extending the reach of paid activity by 520%.

With each video being between 1.5 – 2 minutes in length, the biggest testament to engagement was that video completion rates were an incredible 29%.

Campaign CTR was also 717% above the industry average. And most crucially, the average time spent interacting with product information after viewing one of the films increased by 400%.

Despite not being a sales activation campaign, 11,641 marketing qualified leads were directly attributed to the campaign in the first 3 months.