For the 2014 NCAA March Madness tournament, VaynerMedia helped Dove Men+Care lean in to their 2014 campaign of "Easy Decisions," heightening and celebrating every tough, minute-by-minute decision that makes the college basketball tournament the thrilling, nerve-wracking experience sports fans love. From the thrill of cheering your alma mater's victory to reminding fans with busted brackets that there's always next year, Dove Men+Care was there every step of the way.
Building off of Dove Men+Care's "Easy Decision" brand messaging for Q1, we wanted to truly leverage DM+C's status as an official NCAA partner by focusing on the high-stress nature of March Madness in our social media activation. From coaches choosing plays, players making clutch assists, to viewers at home selecting their favorite teams for their NCAA bracket, we juxtaposed the innumerable difficult decisions throughout the tournament with the easy decision to choose DM+C.
We became an integral, authentic part of the conversation surrounding the series by asking fans what their picks were and what teams they were rooting for, and then went the next step by surprising users with customized imagery based on their own words and pictures. As a result, #TournamentDecisions became an innate part of the way fans talked about the tournament, garnering over 21,000 mentions in just three weeks.
All told, Dove Men+Care was successful in driving 106,000,000 impressions and 1,100,000 engagements for the "Easy Decisions" campaign around March Madness.
We knew our fans (men, 35-49) were extremely engaged with March Madness, so we wanted to reach them where they were, making March Madness a natural choice to leverage Dove Men+Care's partnership with NCAA.
DM+C's activation for March Madness took advantage of Twitter's value as a spotlight on the latest trends and news, leveraging the strengths of the platform as the basis for our campaign. Coupled with the natural fit of the brand's "Easy Decisions" messaging, it was a direct extension of the broader campaign to social media. In order to naturally fit into conversation already happening, we chose #TournamentDecisions as a campaign hashtag, allowing us to talk about March Madness, yet avoid turning off fans with a hashtag that was too strongly branded.
In addition to our organic efforts, paid promotion was optimized to ensure top-performing content was promoted to a targeted audience, informed by real-time community insights/trends among the demo, which yielded higher levels of engagement rates and efficiency.
We developed this campaign to be customized in real time, providing our fans content based on game winners, play-makers and fan bracket picks – congratulating teams for winning, celebrating fans whose brackets were standing strong and more.
An agile planning process allowed us to maximize opportunities, with more than 50% of our content created in day-of, with targeting based on real-time community insights and trends among our core demographic. All this led to higher engagement rates – more than 21% ER, averaging at 7.5%, well surpassing our benchmark goal of 1%. Individual pieces of content on Twitter earning more than 750,000 impressions.
We anticipated opportunities at every turn – for example, ahead of Selection Sunday, we created 14 different iterations of the same content, with "if-then" variants chosen depending how the day's games played out. The piece that was ultimately posted led to earned 1,200,000 impressions.
Additionally, our community management team placed Dove Men+Care at the forefront of the March Madness conversation by speaking the language of our community and organically joining relevant conversations. As a result, our hashtag became part of the parlance of the tournament, with #TournamentDecisions being used more than 21,000 times over the course of 3 weeks.
To activate on such a massive scale and to keep our inter-agency team turning on a dime, VaynerMedia hosted multiple war rooms during key event times – including two practice sessions – to optimize efficiencies across the board in order to drive the best possible results for the brand and the campaign as a whole. Within those events, we thought through every potential detail, with pre-approved creative templates and content themes, assigned seating, well-defined roles, and attendance by key members of the entire inter-agency roster. We trimmed every ounce of fat to create a lean, turn-key system for ideation on to approval and through execution. Afterwards, our contacts at Twitter involved noted it was one of the best social media war room sessions they'd ever seen.
As a result of this planning, our team was able to deliver 331 pieces of customized content on the fly, and engaged 1:1 with over 1,391 individuals during the tournament – a massive undertaking resulting in 81,000 impressions and receiving an astounding 76% response rate.
Our efforts surpassed nearly every single benchmark we established at the outset of the campaign, with over 500% more engagement and over 700% more impressions than anticipated. All told, "Easy Decisions" netted Dove Men+Care a massive 106,000,000 impressions, with more than 1,100,000 engagements on social media in just 3 weeks.
