TRESemmé is the official hair care sponsor of New York Fashion Week and has gained notoriety by partnering with some of the hottest designers including Rebecca Minkoff, Marissa Webb, and Rachel Zoe to create and style the runway looks that complement the designer's fashions for the past 15 seasons. Our mission has become 'Runway Hair You Can Wear', as we seek to make these looks attainable for real women everywhere. Our 'StyleSetters Runway' YouTube series takes viewers backstage illustrating how the runway looks come together; and then translates them into achievable hairstyles that our Millennial audience can do at home using TRESemmé products. Coming out of Autumn/Winter NYFW, Women's Wear Daily reported that "TRESemmé outperformed all other brands in earned media throughout fashion month." With the bar set high, we entered into Spring/Summer NYFW with the goal of bringing coverage to the masses and giving women everywhere access to what's happening on the runways, backstage, and on the streets of New York City in real time. We knew that our position at NYFW was coveted and that consumers yearned for that same experience and wanted it immediately as the event was unfolding. We had experimented across a vast array of social platforms including Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter; in an effort to get women the coverage that they craved. It soon become evident that Snapchat was the new frontier, with the ability to bring consumers live content from NYFW to their highly engaged audience of nearly 100MM daily active Snapchatters.
TRESemmé leveraged Snapchat to address the challenge of connecting with Millennials in today's on demand culture, with the added pressures of getting our audience the content that they want, when they want, and in an authentic way. As a major pop culture moment, NYFW presents infinite opportunities to deliver rich content that draws consumers into this otherwise exclusive experience. Snapchat and TRESemmé identified NYFW as the perfect territory for their 'Live Story' feature, which allowed us to align with user generated content being captured live at NYFW events by the models, editors, designers, bloggers, and tastemakers that our Millennial girl trusts to keep her up to date with all things beauty, fashion, and pop culture. The 'NYFW Live Story' gave the curated event access that consumers crave which could not be more authentic given the storytellers!
The environment was perfect, but we needed to determine how to intersect the UGC content with our brand story. We secured sponsor exclusivity for the 24 hour Live Story and leveraged all (4) :10 second ad opportunities to sequentially pulse our message. We'd seen other brands leverage existing video and commercials within the Live Story space, but we challenged ourselves to intrinsically connect the brand to the Live Story content as it was unfolding. We knew that consumers wanted access, and we were positioned to give her a backstage pass illuminating how designers, hairstylists and models prep before their glamorous runway moments. More importantly we wanted to prove that TRESemmé hair products are used by professionals and are the secret behind hair trends as seen at some of the fashion industry's major runway shows. Given the real time nature of the platform, we decided to capture our brand content merely days before our Live Story debut to ensure it was fresh and in season, but without sacrificing a polished end-product.
We chose to give Snapchat users an insider look at the Marissa Webb show, and leveraged our (4) branded snaps to give the exclusive vantage points of both the backstage and front of house experiences. The snaps chronicled our celebrity hairstylist Jeanie Syfu as she prepped the looks backstage using TRESemmé styling products. It then showed the model's journey from backstage getting styled to making her runway debut, showing off the final show look and rounding out our story of how TRESemmé is the hair authority setting the hair trends at NYFW. These snaps were integrated into the curated UGC content that made up the NYFW Live Story on September 16th, and given their tight link to the event it was a truly native ad experience. Securing exclusive ownership of the story allowed us to build a compelling 4 part narrative that left consumers wanting more as they watched coverage of the event unfold throughout the day. After the Live Story concluded, we expanded to run our Snap ads throughout the publisher channels on Snapchat Discover such as Cosmopolitan and People, to continue to drive reach and reinforce our messaging.
The results from this campaign are astounding! Our TRESemmé Snapchat ads garnered 9.4MM impressions and reached 3.1MM unique viewers. In addition to these quantitative wins, we also successfully boosted our qualitative brand health metrics based on Millward Brown Digital research fielded for this initiative. The ads successfully boosted awareness of the TRESemmé brand showing a +4.1% lift for a brand that is already a household name with strong awareness levels. Ad awareness of those exposed increased +16.1% and we saw a +14% lift in sponsorship association of the brand in relation to NYFW. Most importantly we saw a +22.9% lift in message association of "TRESemmé helps you get the latest hair looks" which is the priority KPI for our NYFW marketing efforts! Viewers 25+ were leading contributors to the overall increases in awareness metrics and were also successfully influenced by the campaign to think more favorably of the brand and purchase TRESemmé products in the future. Likely contributing to the campaign's overall messaging and persuasion successes, 60% of viewers found the ads enjoyable (outperforming the MBD mobile benchmark of 40%) and 90% of viewers reported that they felt the ads fit well on Snapchat!
In addition, TRESemmé was the first brand to sponsor a Global Snapchat Live Story! Our ad units were deployed in Canada, UK, Australia, Norway, and Germany at no additional cost to the brand! This additional scale and value goes far beyond the US performance detailed above, and further solidified our strategic partnership with Snapchat.
