Alka Seltzer has a rich brand history, and in decades past has been well-known for its most famous asset—the “plop plop fizz fizz” jingle. The mascot, Speedy, and jingle used to be integrated with American culture—the song and Speedy were household names.
But by 2021 the jingle needed a refresh to resonate with a new consumer. Alka Seltzer’s challenge was to bring the brand back into relevance in a way that felt natural and present while still retaining its original charm. Creating a new jingle that consumers would engage with and leverage in their own social content critical, all while launching a brand new product with a brand new application, Alka Seltzer Hangover relief.
The brand had clear objectives of driving awareness, engagement, and ultimately eCommerce traffic for their new product 'Alka Seltzer Hangover Relief'. Critically important to Bayer was proving that an integrated influencer campaign would ultimately increase recognition of the new product as it hit the market.
Success was measured by reach in the form of impressions, engagements/engagement rate, traffic driven to retail eCommerce pages, and a comprehensive Meta brand lift study with the goal of driving basis point improvement in brand favorability above Meta benchmarks.
Along with this business goal, a larger campaign objective for Alka Seltzer was to reclaim the brand’s rightful place in culture. So social equity and share of voice were paramount.
For any brand looking to drive relevance and resonate naturally with the current cultural zeitgeist, two of the biggest drivers of human culture are music and dance. We knew that if we wanted Alka Seltzer to reinvigorate its jingle and regain its place in culture that those were two areas we needed to focus on, and that social media was the place where we needed to be seen and heard.
T-Pain was the perfect fit given his embodiment of music in culture, and since the brand already had an amazing musical asset in the Alka Seltzer jingle, all that needed to be done was remix it the T-Pain way.
T-Pain perfectly served as the celebrity spokesperson, and we knew we also needed influential creators in music and dance to help scale the message and get others on social media to join the conversation. Linqia used our proprietary Resonate technology to identify creators on Instagram and TikTok who could speak authentically to their own needs for a hangover relief product, while also having the technical dance skills to remix and duet T-Pain's song.
We selected six carefully vetted and aligned influencers to bring this campaign to life by showing off their Fast as Fizz original dance moves via a “remix” challenge to T- Pain’s remake of the Plop Plop Fizz Fizz jingle. Videos also shared how ASO Hangover helps consumers rebound from a night of drinking so they can take on their day ahead. We took advantage of Instagram’s branded content tool to link our influencers to Alka-Seltzer’s campaign landing page to maximize signal and ensure that the new product message reached the brand’s key audiences.
One of the most interesting challenges given the integrated nature of this campaign was ensuring that influencers chosen and the content produced could be used across different channels and asset types. T-Pain not only posted on social media but was leveraged for media appearances and broader earned media. Influencer content was leveraged for broader paid media placements, and all content had to be optimized for both individual videos and remix/duet posts. This required significant coordination between content teams and very detailed creative specs for each digital channel.
The #plopploplivelive social media movement proved to be a big hit, becoming one of the most crucial elements of the overall campaign and one of the biggest drivers of brand awareness and favorability.
Overall, the campaign garnered 13 million media impressions, 34K clicks to retailer eCommerce pages, and over 25K products added to retailer carts, totaling over $300K of carted value. Top performing organic influencers drove up to a 5.28% engagement rate on their T-Pain Remix Videos, exceeding the program average Reels engagement rate by 2.9X. The top-performing ad unit achieved a 7.29% click-through rate, 4X higher than the brands 2021 benchmark.
A Meta Brand Lift study to determine the influencers' impact on brand lift also demonstrated a +5.7 point increase in ad recall and a +5.2 point increase in brand lift. Meta even estimated that influencer ads caused 52,162 more people to give the desired response to the poll question: How would you describe your overall opinion of Alka-Seltzer Hangover Relief?
Our results show that not only did this influencer campaign drive the business results that Alka Seltzer needed, but also created a cultural moment, reclaiming the fizzy, bicarbonate stomach soother as a household name once again.
