During the 2014 Super Bowl, Edelman and other Unilever agency partners worked together in the AXE "Love Room" to help create relevant, real-time content to support the AXE PEACE campaign.
In addition to agency representatives, the brand partnered with Tumblr Creators to produce original content relevant to AXE, the Super Bowl, and the PEACE campaign for real-time distribution during the game.
We commissioned Tumblr GIF artists to take our core campaign messaging, "Make Love Not War" and create their own unique artistic interpretations. Artist James Curran (SlimJim Studios) created "Care Package," an animated GIF depicting military helicopters airdropping loveable bears. The juxtaposition of weapons of war being used to spread love was a perfect encapsulation of the campaign as a whole.
The "Care Package" GIF ranked among the Top 10 performing Tumblr posts for the Super Bowl by engagement volume.
The primary AXE Social objective for 2014 was to change brand perception via a new brand narrative. The PEACE campaign served as the relaunch moment for the brand on Tumblr, debuting a new voice and focus on collectable content to appeal to the community.
The "Care Package" GIF was a paramount piece of content that allowed AXE to successfully reposition itself on Social in 2014.
The AXE Super Bowl activation with Tumblr represented several never-been-done before milestones in brand partnerships:
• First three-way partnership with a brand, Tumblr, and Yahoo
• First time a collective of creators was commissioned for a major brand partner
• First time Tumblr posts were integrated into Yahoo editorial articles
• First Tumblr brand program around a major sports tentpole
• First Yahoo branded program on Tumblr offering access to Yahoo's Tumblr audience and content made solely for Tumblr
The "Care Package" GIF was amplified with a Mobile CPM buy and was the #4 Sponsored CPG Tumblr Campaign during the Super Bowl garnering over 35K Notes. Additionally the placement yielded 48K+ Total CPM Engagements (on 1.25M Total CPM Impressions) – the .0385 CPM Engagement Rate is a 70% lift over the average Mobile campaign.
As of the day after the game, the AXE Peace Tumblr campaign generated a total of 130K Notes – led by "Care Package" with 35K Notes – and 1M earned impressions. 77% of notes (100K) occurred the day of the Super Bowl.
The rebranding of the AXE Tumblr during the PEACE campaign paved the way for a year of strong Tumblr content to help change brand perception – a core brand objective – that saw an apex in October with the, "Say AXE When You Spray AXE" post that has 158K Notes and was the #3 performing sponsored post across all of Tumblr for 2014.