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’. We created a short ‘mocumentary’ featuring David Beckham and US comedian Kevin Hart, showing Kevin’s attempt to ‘Become Beckham’ for an upcoming audition in the David Beckham biopic – mimicking his every move, and effortlessly cool, everyday style.

The campaign included teasing our audience with a series of organic social posts from David’s and Kevin’s Instagram accounts, as well as behind the scenes short films (15”) leading up to the launch of the 7 minute hero film.

The resulting execution was a 7-minute short ‘mocumentary’ starring David Beckham, featuring Kevin Hart.

We created a 30” trailer for the content, which broke online and on TV in 10 key markets, pushing consumers to watch the full 7 minute film online, available globally.

The film, shot by world-renowned director Frederik Bond, shows David hosting Kevin Hart, who is spending time with David to research the title role in “I, Beckham”, the movie.

The genre is one that David isn’t known for and as a result shows a side of Beckham that the world rarely gets to see.

The campaign was hugely successful.

The 7-minute film was viewed over 20M times. A sign of the likeability of the content was demonstrated by the fact that 6.1M views were organic – viewers deliberately searching out the content. Not only that but 75% of the viewers watched the content to completion.

Viewers on YouTube shared the video onto other platforms 16,400 times (x10 more than the previous H&M Modern Essentials campaign). This goes to prove that people appreciated the content at a level where they chose to share it with their peers.

It is the most liked, the most favourited, the most shared and video with the highest view time of all H&M videos on YouTube.?The video also has a 27 % points more male viewers than the H&M average.

Not only this, but the film was picked up by key news organizations and media outlets: Complex, E! and Hollywood

H&M challenged us to generate interest and buzz around the Autumn/Winter Modern Essentials Collection selected by David Beckham. We needed to show an unexpected side of David that would make our global male audience (18-30) sit up and take notice. As the Modern Essentials is a collection that David would wear in his day-to-day life, we wanted to show our audience that this collection was perfect their everyday life too.

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. After all, if they are consuming up to 2 hours and 15 minutes of online video every week (http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2014/the-men-the-myths-the-legends-why-millennial-dudes-might-be-more-receptive-to-marketing.html) surely we could convince them to engage with our content for 7 minutes?

The key was to utilize our talent, David Beckham, in a way that he hadn’t been captured before, to create content that was genuinely disruptive for the category, and entertaining for the consumer.

H&M challenged us to generate interest and buzz around the Autumn/Winter Modern Essentials Collection selected by David Beckham. We needed to show an unexpected side of David that would make our global male audience (18-30) sit up and take notice. As the Modern Essentials is a collection that David would wear in his day-to-day life, we wanted to show our audience that this collection was perfect their everyday life too.