Sunlight initiated a long-term Brand Do program providing training and resources to enable women to realize their entrepreneurial ambitions and promoted it with Brand Say activities working in tandem with Brand Do on ground. Initially, we focused on featuring offline training events and real women’s testimonials in a conventional way through PR or TV news. It helped strengthen the program’s credibility and awareness, however, with only 10 offline events in 10 provinces each year, the scale was limited.

To overcome this challenge, we changed our approach to make the program famous. We embedded engagement into our purpose deployment by creating an edutainment content in the form of gameshow. This initiative aimed to engage and entertain our target audience while inspiring women to pursue their passions and unleash their full potential. By doing so, we hoped to recruit more participants into the Do program via both offline and online models.

The main objective of the content partnership is to reach mass audience while build the engagement among our bull’s-eye target audience of 18–50-year-old females. That’s why we choose TV which is the No.1 platform for reach and VTV – the National Television Broadcaster – as the media partner to co-create the TV show.

Beyond a show for pure entertainment, we want to inspire women who either are business owners or wish to start their own businesses and spark their interest in joining our Brand Do program. Our ambition is that the show, with the voice of influential media partner, can initiate a change in people’s attitude towards female entrepreneurs, so that a woman can receive more support from her family such as sharing the household chores or responsibilities of taking care of kids, confidently go after her aspiration and get the social recognition that she deserves.

Reality shows have become more and more popular thanks to the entertainment value and celebrities’ involvement. Built on this proven successful platform, "Women Lead Their Lives" leveraged the success factors to create the first-ever playground exclusively for female entrepreneurs. The show was given primetime on VTV3, Vietnam's highest rating entertainment channel, and attracted outstanding candidates who were breaking stereotypes by their age, disabilities, and passions.

To drive engagement, we leveraged celebrities/KOLs involved in the show to spread the word and encourage viewers to vote for their favourite contestants. This encouraged viewers to generate content themselves and drove talkability of the show, making it more authentic and emotive for audiences.

We also re-aired the show on VTV's official YouTube channel and spread out best cuts around key hooks in each episode on mass communities or social networks of business influencers to reach more of our target audience.

"Women Lead Their Lives" achieved impressive successes in numbers, including an average rating of 1.6% among the target audience nationwide (vs. target 1%), with outstandingly higher ratings in the Northern region of Vietnam (4.5-5%). The show also had a total of 3.3 million live viewers, and 17.5 million views across platforms, along with 1 million engagements and 43 news PR.

The actual ROI of the content partnership was 240%, surpassing the committed 202%. The show contributed to promoting the Do program, with 24,000 women participating this year in both offline and online models, double versus last year. During broadcast timing, Sunlight witnessed +173bps share gain helping Sunlight reach the highest market share ever in the past 3 years.

The program helped Sunlight maintain market leader position and receive recognition from UN Women Vietnam & APAC with Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) Awards for three consecutive years.