Our insight:

Babies move way more than their parents realise – over 3km* a day. *New York University

Our execution:

The World’s First Baby Marathon. From Huggies.

To prove just how much babies can move in a day, to put the comfort and fit of Huggies diapers to the test, and to thereby clearly demonstrate why these nappies are the best choice for active little ones, we chose four babies and gave them an audacious goal: 21 adult-length kilometers.

Our custom-made distance-tracking device:

Thanks to the data collected by the babies’ custom-designed distance-tracking devices, our little athletes were able to race one another on our online race course, in real time, from the comfort of their own homes. Their progress was packaged as a series of highlights videos, which were released across multiple digital platforms, until the first baby crossed the finish line 5.8 days later.

Teaser start-date: 28 August 2017.

Marathon start-date: 18 September 2017.

The marathon unfolded in real time for 13 days, with the first baby crossing the finish line in 5.8 days. The campaign was promoted across multiple digital and social platforms (Facebook, search, mobile/premium display and YouTube) for 9 weeks in total. This included a three-week teaser phase to build our audience, two weeks of real-time marathon, and a four-week sum-up of the campaign. During our teaser phase, we also used limited TV and cinema support, as well as targeted instore promotion. The campaign consisted of our campaign page, 1 X 75 second promo film, 3 X 10 second teaser films, various promoted ‘teaser’ social posts (profiles of our four babies, baby warm-ups, a countdown timer, etc) and an instore and online competition where parents could win branded Huggies World’s First Baby Marathon gear for both themselves and their babies.

• The marathon led to a 28.9% increase in diaper sales

• It generated a 29:1 return on investment

• There were over 8.4 million views of the campaign

• It resulted in over R2.4 million in earned PR

• The click-through rate was 194% higher than industry average

• Plus the marathon trended within 10 minutes of launch for 9 hours

Diaper campaigns typically consist of a TV commercial, print and instore messaging. Not surprising it’s difficult to get moms to pay attention to a competitor brand, as everything becomes ‘wallpaper’. Yet our moms actually spend a lot of time online, either on social, or actively seeking out info about their baby on relevant websites.

This, coupled with the insight that babies can move over 3km* a day (*New York University), led us to The World’s First Baby Marathon – an idea that, due to its very nature (a real-time online race), could only be executed via a game-changing channel strategy.

We wanted to snap our middle-income moms out of competitor-brand purchasing auto-pilot by creating a reconsideration trigger at the active baby stage. To do this, we wanted to: 1) catch them in a place they were spending most of their active media-consumption time, ie. online; and 2) show them something completely surprising about their baby, consequently making them aware of a need they never knew their baby had. We then wanted to position our diaper-range as the only answer to this need.

Once we’d settled on the idea of The World’s First Baby Marathon, our media planning became about letting moms experience the real-time race as it unfolded online, as opposed to just a release of branded content. We chose to let our media timings be dictated by the babies’ real-time movement data, retargeting and building our audience from teaser to wrap-up phase.

Our situation/brief/objectives

In a market dominated by the competitor (where Huggies is the number two brand) we were tasked to drive trial of the Huggies active baby diaper range and show we have the best nappy for moving babies, in order to switch competitor-loyalists to our brand, and ultimately grow brand penetration amongst middle-income moms.

Our challenge

Once moms have bought into the rival diaper brand (usually at the newborn baby stage), they rarely reconsider their choice of brand. Instead they go into purchasing auto-pilot, and simply continue sizing up through their favourite brand’s range of products, until their child no longer requires diapers. We needed to snap them out of this and induce trial of our diapers, because trial in this market generally always leads to conversion.