Shortlisted 2020
Lifestyle, Luxury & Fashion
Brand
Levi's
Entered by:
OMD EMEA
Credits:
TCO London (Huck Mag)
What Does Performance Mean To You?
The Challenge
The menswear category has been growing steadily for the last 5 years, even outpacing the womenswear category for the first time. And whilst Levi’s has seen its business performance follow a similar trend, recently it has been showing signs of stagnation. To address this, Levi’s decided to increase its focus on the menswear category and launched a new range called “Performance”.
The launch of the campaign needed to consider market realities. On one side it needed to cut-through the clutter of men’s apparel advertising by being differentiated. On the other side, it needed to deliver strong short-term business results, but also cater for long-term brand building, by increasing the consideration for the Levi’s brand and demonstrating that it is culturally relevant to the male target audience.
This campaign had a clear objective: Get men 25-44 to consider Levi’s Performance jeans by encouraging them to discover the range through culturally relevant content.
The Creative Solution
DO YOU AGREE THAT MEN ARE TO AVOID BEING FEMININE, SHOW NO WEAKNESS AND BE TOUGH?
Only 40 years ago, this is what was expected of men, the “Blueprint of Manhood” published in the 70s demonstrated all the behaviors men needed to adopt to be considered a “real man”.
As the above demonstrates, masculinity has historically been about being strong & powerful. But masculinity and what it means to be a man today is evolving . And with this, the definition of what it means to “perform” as a man has changed.
The embodiment of this change is shown through the% of stay-at-home dads, which has increased by 20% in 20 years and the fact that modern men are three times more likely to cry in public than their fathers.
On the other hand, 30% of men believe that their partners would think they were “less of a man” if they lost their job or didn’t “perform” well.
Performance is a topic which has always been core to the definition of masculinity, but with the social evolutions, the definition of performance is changing.
With this campaign we wanted to celebrate men that represent this change and shed some light on modern masculinity to emotionally connect with our audience.
The Media/Content Amplification Solution
To celebrate today’s masculinity, we wanted to partner with a credible publisher that authentically addressed these topics, so we partnered with “Huck” . A bi-monthly magazine, website and video platform that dedicates its editorial to unfiltered voices of men who are making a change in the world .
The key challenge was to create a powerful campaign which resonated in multiple countries.
Masculinity is ingrained in culture and different cultures are moving at a different pace when it comes to modern masculinity. So, we worked with three men who represented modern masculinity across different cultures: UK, Russia and Germany.
The three men were:
- Owen, a photographer from London who’s focus is on what self-image means to a
- Tafel Santana, a German rapper with Dominican roots redefining the vernacular of hip hop and male
- Kirill Grigg, an artist and philosopher from Russia, part of a community of young Russian men who are rebuilding what it means to perform creatively in their rapidly changing
The content created explored their personal definitions of performance, their challenges, motivations and thoughts.
The partnership included a premium original hero film and a series of editorial stories that combined photography and profile films of our three characters.
We activated the content across all Huck digital channels including Facebook, lnstagram and YouTube, allowing us to authentically target our audience and benefit from a positive association between Huck & Levi’s. We then amplified the content on Levi’s owned channels to increase the reach and drove the audience to the Huck website where all the content was hosted.
But the role of this partnership didn’t stop there, we still needed to highlight the functional benefits of the Levi’s Performance range. For this, we re-purposed the partnership assets and created Display assets that highlighted the innovative & functional attributes of the jeans, linking back to the stories of our three men.
We amplified the assets to an audience who were in-market for particular innovative jeans in contextually relevant places, and we used Dynamic Creative Optimisation to target relevant copy to relevant audiences. Using re-purposed lifestyle assets was a first for Levi’s so we tested the partnership product assets vs. the Levi’s usual product assets to understand if the audience resonated better with one or the other.
The Result
The partnership successfully impacted the business, brand and media metrics it was being measured against.
The business generated by this campaign was above expectation , whilst it was not optimised towards sales , it still generated over $220,000 revenue across our key markets (UK, DE, SE & FR).
Answering our business challenge, the campaign also generated strong results for the brand with an increase of 6% for men considering Levi’s as a culturally relevant brand.
From a media perspective, we had a completed view average of 28% (largely above the partners average of 3%) and we delivered 73% more pages views than planned, demonstrating that the audience had a real interest in the content created.
When it comes to demonstrating the product benefits, we saw an increase of 40% CTR for the re-purposed partnership assets vs. the classic Levi’s product assets . Demonstrating that the audience resonated better with lifestyle imagery vs. product shots.