Over the past few years, Pure Leaf has built strong equity on its quality tea credentials and mastery. Though the functional message resonated with consumers, growth hit a plateau in 2018.
To return Pure Leaf to dominance, we needed to break through category trends and create a message that connected to our audience on a deeper emotional level.
In Q1 2020, Pure Leaf launched the new ‘No Is Beautiful’ platform, with a culturally relevant, breakthrough media campaign that would drive buzz, consumer interest, and deliver our message of inspiring women to embrace the beauty of saying no in a world of pressures and obligations. With a general business objective of driving sales lift for Pure Leaf, our integrated media campaign was tasked with driving awareness and favorability of the new “No Is Beautiful” platform.
We saw a unique opportunity to strengthen our position as the category leader and improve brand distinction by creating a brand purpose that would resonate with and recruit a broader group of people.
We knew that this meant getting deeper with our key strategic target (“Liz”) than ever before. We uncovered a clear tension - the importance of, and difficulty in, mastering simplicity in an overly complex world. Liz strives for perfection but is overwhelmed by life’s pressures, obligations, and expectations. Saying “no” can be hard.
Our media strategy leveraged tried and true channels to establish a strong foundation to amplify the “No Is Beautiful” messaging, while also leaning into tactics that allowed us to intercept Liz during her moments of “me time.”
We seeded the campaign during the inaugural BravoCon in New York City, where we partnered with Bravo Talent and Housewives to encourage women everywhere to say ‘no’ to their day-to-day routines and ‘yes’ to the ultimate fan experience.
The messaging struck a chord with Amy Poehler, who jumped on board as our “Ambassador of No” and launched our hero film, “Ready Set No”, which she narrated. We also reimagined fairytales with Poehler in our “Once Upon a No” (OUAN) digital film series, which we promoted on Social.
We drove broad awareness via national TV across Cable, Early Morning, Prime, and Syndication and extended reach to an unduplicated audience on contextually relevant Streaming partners.
Leveraging trusted partners in Facebook/Instagram and YouTube, we scaled the “No Is Beautiful” messaging where our “Liz” target was engaged via behavioral and contextual targeting tactics.
We created custom GIFs in partnership with GIPHY to bring to life the TVC. Additionally, we partnered with PopSugar to create custom articles (i.e. “Why You Should Say No To Answering Work Emails Right Away”), in conjunction with social takeovers.
In partnership with the RhythmOne Influencer Network, we leveraged influencers, including Karamo Brown, Ashley Tisdale, Quinta Brunson, Busy Phillips, and Niecy Nash, to extend our Social reach to drive our new messaging with an authentic, personalized tone.
High-profile OOH in New York’s iconic Times Square launched the campaign in a big way, as we were effectively able to negotiate extensions as added value once the original flight had finished. Through Print, we showed up in premium environments while “Liz” enjoyed “me time.”
To seed the launch of our newest innovation, Pure Leaf introduced Cold Brew at the coolest event of the season – The Sundance Film Festival – through an on-the-ground partnership with AMC’s Sundance TV. The sponsorship involved sampling activation, panel sponsorships, talent alignment, and contextual OOH at the event.
Finally, we gave women the tools to declare “No Is Beautiful” by concluding a year-long partnership with Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club ‘October 2019 Book Pick’ – Fair Play – the New York Times Bestseller that helps women rebalance the domestic workload and reclaim their natural gifts and instincts. We partnered with author Eve Rodsky and created custom content and helpful tips designed for women to say ‘no’.
The first phase of the “No Is Beautiful” campaign we garnered 1 Billion impressions, with nearly half of them being earned. The campaign improved mental availability and brand distinction for Pure Leaf, increasing top of mind awareness by 31%.
Pure Leaf started the year off strong, experiencing +10.5% sales lift vs. the previous year. This was not only the fastest sales growth for Pure Leaf in years, but also nearly doubled the growth rate of the entire Ready-to-Drink Tea category YTD.
Specific to our integrated media campaign:
Online engagement rate came in 3.5x higher than Pepsi Beverage North America benchmarks
Influencer posts resonated with users (51% View Rate vs. 9% benchmark!) and drove 10MM views of OUAN content, while also garnering 99.37% positive sentiment
Significant brand lift was observed where OUAN creative was featured, including on YouTube, which drove 17MM views of OUAN content
+5.6% lift in ad recall seen in 2020 Pure Leaf Cold Brew Facebook/Instagram execution
High favorability baseline vs. Facebook/YouTube – 48% of respondents have a positive opinion of Pure Leaf
Pure Leaf Print continued to drive ROI for the Brand and saw readers responding positively to our ads, expressing inspiration to act after seeing our creative
Popsugar activations saw positive results, including 21% increase in purchase intent, 508K page views against the custom articles (vs the 450K that were guaranteed), and extremely high CTRs
