In April, men's skincare brand Dove Men+Care launched a new global campaign 'Care Makes a Man Stronger'. This was all about confronting the stereotype of strength as brute force to reveal that true strength is the strength to care. We were asked to develop a social campaign that supported this key message but in a rugby context to celebrate Dove Men+Care's sponsorship of the Rugby World Cup 2015.
The objective of the wider social campaign was to spark meaningful conversations amongst our target audience using rugby as a vehicle, generate awareness of the brand, increase consideration and increase twitter followers.
As part of this we were tasked with creating an emotional social film to launch it that would stand out amongst all the rugby clutter.
Rugby is a true gentleman's game where the players respect the ref and each other, the opposition fans sit in the same stand and at the end of the match any rivalry is forgotten and everyone goes for a beer together. To sum this up and dramatise the caring and unified nature of rugby fans and players, we created the catchy and memorable campaign line, #ScrumTogether, that ran as the thread through all executions and help us track the conversations that we sparked.
To bring this sentiment to life in our launch film we took Rudyard Kipling's beautiful poem 'If' which ends with the line 'You'll be a man my son' and rewrote it with a rugby twist. The poem features a range of moments that genuinely show rugby players' caring side - from squeezing the mascot's hand and having a quiet word in the new boy's ear, to being proud to shed a tear and giving recognition to the fans.
We had access to eight of the greatest players who play for the four home nations and we wanted to show them in unison as true role models that represent how a true, strong man should act. We filmed the players emotionally delivering these lines in a rousing journey from arriving at the stadium, to getting pumped in the changing room, to exiting the tunnel. The twist at the end sees the child mascot deliver the 'you'll be a man my son' line as he looks up to Owen Farrell before he steps onto the pitch.The film signs off with the global campaign line and our call to action #ScrumTogether.
What made this film so unique was the fact that so many other brands playing in this rugby space featured in-game footage of players smashing each other, treating the match like war and highlighting strength as aggression. Instead we have brought to life the touching and honest moments the cameras never see. In addition we can honestly say we are the first brand to get rugby players to recite poetry.
The film was uploaded to YouTube and shared across Dove Men+Care's social channels in addition to the featured players' social channels at several points during the RWC2015.
On YouTube it received over 1.2 million views and the average view duration was extremely high at 54 seconds.
On Twitter it received 10 million+ impressions between September and October.
Tweet engagement rates reached 19.4%
The film contributed as part of the wider social campaign to several extremely impressive stats;
- Dove Men +Care was ranked as Number 1 RWC brand on social media across the tournament by Onalytica Top 100
- @dovemen had 44% share of voice amongst all RWC2015 sponsors
- @dovemen saw a 10% increase in followers
- #scrumtogether had 68% share of voice amongst all RWC2015 sponsors
