We created a campaign opposition to the well-worn semiotics of fashion advertising, and tapped into the insight that our audience is influenced more by long form content and programming than traditional ‘advertising’. Following on from the launch episode “Becoming Becoming (2015), we created a short ‘mocumentary’ featuring David Beckham and US comedian Kevin Hart. The storyline for this episode followed on from the first, where we left Kevin auditioning for the role of David in a Beckham Biopic. Following the unlikely success of Kevin as David in a biopic of his like, we now follow Kevin and a reluctant David as they travel to Vegas to pitch Beckham: The Musical, starring Kevin Hart in the title role, of course.

Our target audience were global males aged 18-30, a group that are traditionally hard to reach using just traditional above-the-line media. Indeed, we knew that this group were leading the increases in online video consumption which had grown by 23% YoY in 2015 (http://www.zenithoptimedia.com/mobile-drive-19-8-increase-online-video-consumption-2016/).

So instead of continuing what had gone before (30” TVC, print based media, short form online video) we wanted to create long-form content that would entertain our consumers – creating something that they genuinely wanted to watch.

We knew that we had caught the attention of our audience from the first episode in 2015, and so we decided to follow the narrative directly on from the first.

Learning from what worked in the first episode, we retained the mockumentary style, but added marquee moments to keep our audience engaged and to ensure they were as captivated by this episode as they were the first.

The first episode was held up by H&M as a new way of marketing fashion to a male audience, it was hugely successful commercially. The second episode was even more successful.

6-minute film was viewed over 25M times. 9M views were organic, 70% of the viewers watched the content to completion.

Viewers on YouTube shared the video onto other platforms 21,700 times (x12 more than the previous Modern Essentials campaign). It overtook the first episode as the most liked, most favourited, most shared and video with the highest view time of all H&M videos on YouTube. The video also has 33% points more male viewers than the H&M average.

It was picked up by key news organizations and media outlets: Complex, E! and Hollywood reporter and key social organisation such as LadBible and Joe.com.

Consumers and viewers called for a third episode, and even touted the possibility of a feature-film.