Cold and flu illnesses lead to 60MM missed school days a year, which can mean lower grades and missed wages for parents. In 2019, our challenge was to make Lysol’s relaunched “Healthy Habits” teaching program fun, by arming parents and teachers with the materials needed to interest kids and keep them healthy and in school.
Knowing that teaching things like washing your hands are not inherently interesting topics for kids, we provided information for our target to use at home and in class. Zenith partnered Lysol with a beloved children’s champion, a critical part of our strategy, to help us leverage credibility with this audience.
Lysol challenged our team to concept and execute a custom content program with Nickelodeon that teachers would find and potentially bring into the classroom.
Our strategic solution sought to rewrite the existing learning experience around germs in a way that teachers and parents would want to use it. Tapping into kids’ love of slime, our content practice partnered with Nickelodeon and their iconic Slime IP to create “Slime School,” a co-branded virtual, social, and linear experience, to drive impact and connect Lysol to the effort of stopping the spread of germs and illness in the classroom. The root of the partnership was to take Nick’s IP, and use it to ‘slime’ the Lysol Healthy Habits site, combining publisher and advertiser site content in a fresh and elevated way that RB had not previously done before.
The slimed Lysol ecosystem featured new learning materials such as downloadable classroom materials and an animated video lesson designed for use with classroom SMART boards. Custom promotional assets were created to drive users to the site, like a talent-led social stunt revealing the curriculum and accompanying linear teaser that ran on Nickelodeon, driving impact to highlight how Lysol helps turn sick days into “Slime Days” – one of Nickelodeon’s highest honors!
To launch communications, we ran our custom linear spot on Nick Networks for the first three weeks of our 4Q19 flight, coupled with a pulsed launch on Nick’s social. This was further bolstered by paid social targeting parents of kids 5-12, and additional influencer social content posts by our lead talent, taking us into mid-quarter. Micro and mid-level influencer talent rounded out the campaign on Facebook and Instagram to drive further awareness; this talent was selected for their strong parent and teacher audiences.
It was our long-form stunt video, where we brought awareness to the program via a classroom prank pulled on unsuspecting children, that lived on Nickelodeon’s Facebook and delivered the best results -- traffic to the Lysol site.
This multi-pronged program where we slimed the brand’s website was a first of its kind for RB and Viacom.
Lysol’s Healthy Habits page saw a massive spike in visits after the partnership’s launch on October 3rd, 2019. 87% of site views that week were driven by Nick’s social content, illustrating the consumer response to the creative and interest/need for the content. Time spent is 6x higher on Lysol’s updated Healthy Habits site as a result of the slime-ification and classroom materials. The program generated 50MM+ impressions and video content saw 4.8MM+ views. Social content delivered 5.33MM+ engagements and blasted through benchmarks, seeing a 14.44% ER. The campaign’s most engaged post was one of the Instagram posts from a teacher influencer, generating 29% engagement with her audience.
