Sixty-nine percent of all the clothes we wear contain plastic. This means that every 25 minutes, an Olympic swimming pool worth of oil is used for their production. The issue is that, despite fashion-loving audiences wanting to be more sustainable, there isn’t widespread awareness of how the clothes they wear affect the environment or what environmentally-friendly alternatives are available. Our challenge therefore was to help audiences around the world to think differently about their clothes. To do so without criticizing them, we needed to shine a light on the harm synthetic fabrics cause and alter people’s existing assumptions about wool.
Through research across international markets, we found that:
By triangulating these insights together across geographies, we had a blueprint of how to encourage our audiences to ‘Check the Label.’
To be noticed and recognized by audiences who love fashion, we needed to act like a luxury fashion brand. Our approach needed a confident body language, with bold and unmissable placements in the spaces and places our target audience were most likely to spend time. So rather than launching everywhere all at once, we leaned into fashion weeks across New York City, London and Paris to maximize our time on the catwalk. We developed three communications pillars to guide our strategy across each touchpoint and bring our campaign to life: maximize impact, build salience and drive meaningful engagement.
For our hero film, we optimized digital video to high attention non-skip and bumper formats across YouTube. But we needed placements to drive earned media attention for maximum reach. To deliver an Olympic swimming pool’s worth of impact, we created a physical presence that matched. Working closely with creative, client and partners, we identified the most ‘insta-worthy’ OOH sites in the world: New York’s Times Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus. Then we planned anamorphic DOOH creative to light up these sites at the busiest times across each city’s fashion week — providing the perfect PR ‘shot’ for media outlets to use.
To build salience, our bold ads showed up exclusively across aesthetic-focused social video environments, Instagram and TikTok, targeting followers of luxe fashion brands. We amplified the brand’s hero film with high-frequency cutdowns extolling wool’s benefits. To lean into luxury brand behaviors, we also hand-selected premium street-level OOH sites across the coolest neighborhoods of the world’s fashion capitals.
We didn’t stop there. Further mimicking luxury brands, we partnered with WeTransfer for an interactive platform takeover across each market during Fashion Week. This meant our agenda-setting fashion audience engaged with Woolmark’s message as they shared media or experienced the events. After the campaign’s initial success, we expanded its geographic reach to engage fashion audiences around the globe, seeing strong results in new markets and channels.
The campaign’s successful launch delivered widespread earned media coverage (190+ outlets), and high traffic to our online hub (420k+ clicks across the campaign). Brand tracking indicated we smashed our objectives. Impressions across platforms totaled more than 270 million, and the video garnered 90 million views on social. Woolmark saw strong uplifts in Aided Awareness across all markets (up 6-12%), becoming one of the preeminent fashion ads for surveyed users. We saw incredible uplift in associations of Woolmark representing ‘environmentally-friendly’ (up 22-29%), ‘fashionable’ (up 18-25%) and ‘good quality’ (up 10-14%).
Our strategy and results in the campaign’s initial phase gave the brand and stakeholders confidence in the ability to capture audiences’ attention across markets and have a real impact, resulting in the campaign’s expansion into Italy, Germany and Australia. In 2023 we aim to take steps to move beyond driving consideration to impacting deeper behavioural change buoyed by the momentum of actions to date.
