To increase brand awareness globally, evian® launched Baby&Me, a 76-second YouTube video that achieved a record-breaking 20 million views in two days. Go behind the scenes and see how the evian® Babies and YouTube TrueView garnered 100 million views in just over two months, won four awards at Cannes and triggered a worldwide phenomenon of brand love with unprecedented engagement rates.
Goals
Increase brand love worldwide
Transcend the success of previous evian YouTube hits
Influence awareness and sales significantly
Approach
Make an extremely creative, high-quality and engaging YouTube video
Place the video at the heart of a global digital campaign and take advantage of synergy with TV
Use TrueView to engage with the right audience and Analytics to fine-tune the media plan in real time
Results
20M views in two days, 100M views after 10 weeks, 6.9M shares
The campaign app, which allowed people to “babify” faces, generated 25M baby pictures
Won Silver and Bronze in the Film category, Silver in the Film Craft category and Gold in the Outdoor category at the 2013 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity
Baby&Me, the latest ‘evian® Babies’ video from the world-famous mineral water brand, has become a runaway YouTube success.
Inspired by the "Live Young" message from evian®, the brief for Baby&Me was to stay true to brand DNA and build on the success of the company’s two previous YouTube hits. The goals of the campaign were to increase brand awareness and sales globally. It surpassed all expectations.
The worldwide brand love phenomenon started immediately: Twenty million people watched Baby&Me in just two days. It had over 100 million views across various platforms in only 10 weeks, the same number the first Roller Babies film achieved over an entire year in 2009. Beyond views, evian® enjoyed outstanding PR coverage and also saw a significant increase in market share in its top markets, including the U.S., U.K., France and Germany.
How did the love affair between evian® and YouTube begin and what continues to drive it?
Rewind to 2009
Back in 2009, evian® faced a challenge. The company wanted to run the first truly global campaign across 143 countries and engage with a worldwide audience, but only had the budget to use TV in a few countries.
YouTube was the solution. Moving away from a TV-focused model based on 30-second ads, evian® designed the Roller Babies campaign specifically YouTube. In doing so, it leveraged the best features of digital—a global reach, precise targeting and creative freedom. Since its first video became a YouTube hit, evian® has succeeded repeatedly in engaging with users, who are much more than just viewers. The company has been winning fans who interact with what they watch, sharing and parodying content, enabling the brand to deepen its relationship with the audience.
The beautiful thing about YouTube is that the engagement that is coming out of it has nothing to do with a forced message. This is why TrueView is probably the best way to advertise on the web.
But this also challenges evian® to continue making videos that YouTube users will want to actively engage with. As Laurent Houel, Global evian® Brand Director at Danone, notes, “It’s not advertising, it’s entertainment.”
The great news is that YouTube opens up an exciting new creative platform, allowing evian® to tell stories and encourage audience engagement in a way that transcends conventional TV advertising. This is precisely what evian® has done, with enormous success, and the TrueView feature has played a huge part in the success story.
TrueView allows YouTube users to choose
With TrueView, people have the freedom to only watch ads they find interesting. So ads by evian® reach people already primed to hear their message. Also, YouTube Analytics enabled evian® to track and optimize the performance of ads. A single global video, managed centrally, allowed evian® to be agile, fine-tuning and performing real-time adjustments. evian® could accelerate views where needed and trigger additional organic views.
Now, as Michael Aidan, VP Marketing Danone Waters (CMO) & Head of Digital at Danone, says, “The beautiful thing about YouTube is that the engagement coming out of it has nothing to do with a forced message. I click to watch videos because I want to. I share videos because I like them. We’re now into permission marketing and what YouTube enables us to do is actually to make great content available to everyone and allow people to choose whether they want to see it or not, which is why TrueView is probably the best way to advertise on the web.”
Sharing the love
Hilarious dancing, catchy music and spectacular special effects have all contributed to Baby&Me’s astonishing popularity, triggering a powerful emotional engagement with the film. Since its debut, a remarkable 334 copycat versions have appeared, and more than 6.9 million viewers have shared the video on social networks. For Aidan, this is the campaign's real achievement: going “one step further than simply having great content. It’s the capacity people have to actually own content and add their own perceptions. So it’s not just the millions of direct views of a video like Baby&Me but those cases where people have changed music or images and added something else that adds up to success.” Baby&Me has set the bar high, but there’s still more to come—watch this space to see what the evian® babies do next!
