Action Man is the flagship brand for Hasbro, but has been hit hard lately by Hollywood and TV programming-led rivals. Our goal was to fight back against these young upstarts and re-establish Action Man as an exciting and relevant action hero in the hearts and minds of kids. As a result of this strategy the ultimate goal was to regain the No. 1 position in the UK action figure market.

In terms of results the response from kids was massive – we polled over 103,000 votes. Compare this with the year-long Big Read event on the BBC, where The Lord of The Rings won with 174,000 votes; Action Man would have come fourth! Most importantly Action Man did regain the position of No. 1 action figure, in the all-important run up to Christmas!

We proposed a world first, in an interactive vote campaign where kids could decide the conclusion of the episodic advertising campaign: Dr X was left hanging over the very death-ray he planned to use to destroy the Earth. Action Man fans were then asked to vote across multiple channels: should Action Man save Dr X? Two endings were created, one of which would never be played out. The second stage was to reveal the outcome of the vote! Here we used a 60” ‘roadblock’ across every single kids' commercial channel at 7:30am on Saturday 15th November (the key time for kids viewing in the UK). Hasbro’s PR agency also helped us gain valuable press in the TV listings, to make this reveal ad a real ‘appointment to view’.

The build up to the TV vote gained maximum involvement through multi-dimensional partnerships, which are detailed below. Partner websites: we selected the most important web brands for kids such as CITV, Cartoon Network and Hasbro’s own ActionMan.com to push the vote mechanic online. Action Man comic: we also managed to integrate third party, licensed properties such as the Action Man comic, published by Panini. They picked up the full story and timed the reveal to co-ordinate with ours. Trade involvement: perhaps of paramount importance to Hasbro was the way the retail trade got behind the idea as this helped forge important relationships and improved point of sale merchandising. Action Man himself visited stores to promote the TV activity and Hamley’s ran a Final Fight window display. However, the most incredible outcome was the retailers running ‘vote flashes’ (calls to vote for the TV’s climax) in their catalogues, the Christmas present bibles!

The communication strategy was to engage and involve kids in Action Man through tapping into their imagination and requiring their active participation in the outcome of his year-long advertising story. The key insight was that kids lead multi-dimensional lives and successful brands like Pop Idol and Harry Potter embrace this. We needed to involve kids with the brand and we found that engagement and interest was heightened when they felt they had a real input. If TV programmes can be talked about and people feel they can affect them, why not media? The key innovation was to translate the learnings from these popular entertainment vehicles into an advertising event that would generate the talk ability and engagement, which traditional, passive advertising content could not deliver.