Clearasil has been called out in the past for trying too hard to relate to teens. So, for this campaign, we decided to come clean: we know acne, we just don’t know teens. We knew being honest was the only way it would feel authentic to teens, so we created content in which we guessed what they might like and included a strong CTA asking teens to tell us what they really thought.

We then used their interactions with our content to serve additional bespoke creative responses, leveraging the social platforms they turn to most to ladder up to the larger self-deprecating idea that, while Clearasil may not get teens, they are experts in the field of acne.

Our rollout began with pre-roll and social assets with a strong CTA inviting teens to tell us what they thought. We created a framework for developing and monitoring the responses we were getting and worked hand in hand with the clients to develop a nimble process for implementing incremental custom responses to the engagements we were getting, all in a timely manner.

We then took the learnings from our Facebook and Instagram response activity and created bespoke Snapchat creative. This content leaned in on key pieces of the story that teens had particularly strong engagement with and helped connect the larger Clearasil story.

Finally, we selected established teen-focused content-distribution partners that allowed us to effectively weave Clearasil into the storyline in an authentic manner.

Our timing for the campaign focused on two periods of the year when we knew acne would be top of mind: prom and back-to-school season.

In 2016, we set out to drive brand trust and relevancy with teens who, in turn, will drive moms to purchase. As a result of our campaign, we significantly boosted ad recall, brand favorability and purchase intent across social and OLV channels, indicating that our creative broke through the clutter and resonated well with our target audiences. More specifically, we saw a 45% lift in ad recall and 25% lift in purchase intent on YouTube, an 11% increase in ad recall and 1% lift in brand favorability on Facebook, and a 39% lift in ad recall and 19% lift in brand favorability on Tremor. Notably, purchase intent on Tremor saw significant lifts across both parents and teens (8% lift in intent among parents and 15% lift among teens), further solidifying the effectiveness of our creative in driving relevancy with teens and compelling moms to purchase.