We were tasked with connecting with British pet owners to give them strong emotional reasons to treat their animals regularly with FRONTLINE Spot On flea & tick treatment. There wasn’t initially a budget for new analogue advertising or the authority to commission a new UK specific web site.
The resultant social network based, photo-sharing campaign (HugYourPet) has become so successful for the brand that it now sits at the centre of UK marketing strategy. Hug Your Pet has also been presented globally as an example of best practice.
Why did it work so well?
We discovered pet owners were disproportionately high users of photography across social networks. We joined in with this action, adding value, but maintaining the narrative of open sharing.
We championed all animal lovers’ great desire to be close to and hug their pets, and show fellow pet owners how much they loved their furry chums.
The action of getting up close and personal with Tiddles meant that FRONTLINE became front of mind during these key moments of intimacy.
2. Objectives and Strategy
Animal health company Merial owns FRONTLINE Spot On, a global dog & cat flea + tick treatment. FRONTLINE had historically only been available from vets, but was now widely available. As a default choice the brand had acquired the emotional neutrality of a commodity purchase. This was underlined by: a global Merial website aimed at the vet channel; a dry, factual consumer FRONTLINE site; and the same re-voiced European ad running on TV for the last 3 years.
While the consumer had no engagement with the FRONTLINE brand online, they were heavily engaged with pets digitally. By studying this behaviour it became clear that a brand like FRONTLINE could gain permission to join in.
Pet owners were not only keen friend collectors online but they were also enthusiastic photo sharers. We could see that it was possible to galvanise this behaviour around the desire for acceptance as a good pet owner.
We set out to talk with pet photo sharers on social networks with a simple ‘Hello, we like your picture, can we feature it on our page?’ making it very clear that we were pet lovers from the brand FRONTLINE Spot On.
We then started to reward our favourite images with a prominent position on our pages. The best images were printed on mugs (TGI had shown us pet owners over index as ‘heavy’ tea drinkers) and then sent back to the owners, thus building data and permissions for future usage.
3. Implementation
We set up HugYourDog & HugYourCat profiles on Bebo, Facebook and Flickr. These in turn began to feed content into single page microsites: HugYourDog.co.uk and HugYourCat.co.uk (HYD, HYC) which could be accessed independently or via a HugYourPet landing page.
We had followed our audience behaviour online and studied closely the look and feel of the sites they visited which appeared to be quite folksy web 1.0. HYD & HYC.co.uk had to be reassuringly familiar if we were to be seen as not just working for FRONTLINE but ordinary pet owners like them.
HYD & HYC.co.uk had many links leading from them to measure specific users’ intentions. To engender trust these were a mixture of bespoke, corporate and third party sites, e.g. photo printing, flea and tick information pages etc. We also designed a Google map mash-up ‘Find your nearest vet or pharmacy’; a subtle reminder to purchase via these historically full price channels.
Using the content generated we ran an online display campaign driving consumers specifically to HugYourPet.co.uk, and an evolving PPC campaign supported all activity.
Because of the success of the initial social network stage we were later awarded the brief to produce new 30” TVC and POS. This was developed using content from the earlier stages of the campaign and directed people to HugYourPet.co.uk
4. Campaign Proposition and Execution
Show everyone that you love your pet by sharing photos of you hugging it.
Pet owners using Flickr, Facebook and Bebo were encouraged to link their pictures to our profiles and therefore interlinked with our microsites; HYD & HYC.co.uk.
By joining existing conversations FRONTLINE was relating to consumers on a non-corporate basis. But HYD & HYC.co.uk also provided the answers to day-to-day questions on fleas and ticks, as well as being jumping off points for photo books and printing.
We created a unique HYP visual style using a friendly rounded font. Subtle FRONTLINE association was via key brand colours of blue and green.
The microsites were designed around a blog style single page look. The copy had a deliberate chatty blog charm (our hobby) balanced with very straightforward information about the product (our day job).
5. Campaign results
- The campaign has engaged by giving a human face to a previously ‘cold’ brand. This has driven not only sales (up month on month since Nov 08) but purchase intent which rose to 69%, with brand awareness above 80% (Dynamic Logic/Millward Brown)
- The latter stages of the campaign achieved over 15 million unique impressions (Mediaplex)
- HYP.co.uk has had over 470,000 unique visitors (Google)
- There were just under 30,000 HYD & HYC goal conversions with 7,000 being purchase intention
- 38,500 HYP Flickr profile views with 335 photos back linked to personal profiles
- Our Creative Director, a lifetime pet avoider, bought his first dog as a direct result of this campaign.
