As a brand Walkers believe that with a bite of levity and positivity they can turn everyday adversities into something a bit better. Both humour and snacks are known to help lighten difficult moments and lift our moods – and who couldn’t do with a bit more of that at the moment? ????♂ So when life gives you potatoes, make crisps! ???? Walkers are bringing this greater purpose to life with an unmissable campaign and by teaming up with Comic Relief to improve the nation’s mental wellbeing through the power of humour.
At OMD UK we have worked on an integrated media strategy to launch this new positioning with three tranches of activity:
1) Landing purpose with impact:
We invited the nation to write positive tweets with #TweetRelief. For every positive tweet with the hashtag Walkers we donated £1 to Comic Relief. Driven by Twitter Spotlight, first-view and in-feed. #TweetRelief ended up getting 250,000 engagements, including clicks, likes, shares and comments and £3,500 was donated to Comic Relief with this hashtag.
Supporting media drove engagement with a long-term Comic Relief partnership – which was heroe’d on Red Nose Day on BBC1.
This is just the first step in the partnership with Comic Relief, over the next 2 years, Walkers & Comic Relief will be working hard to raise £2 million to fund organisations that aim to support and help improve people’s mental wellbeing and give them the tools to be able to tackle life’s everyday challenges.
2) Driving Scale & Talkability:
A “simulcast” audio-visual launch, with a combination of TV, BVOD, Sky AdSmart, Social and YouTube over the weekend reached 64%+ of the UK in the first 24 hours, kicking off in Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway on ITV.
Our unmissable media plan will reach 95% of the population over the course of 10 weeks through a truly multi-channel approach.
The two ads featured award- winning comedian Asim Chaudhry (Chabuddy G) and Jessica Knappett.
3) Cultural Relevance
But we haven’t stopped there, we will also be hijacking the culture of the nation, using contextual placements to serve silver lining messages in everyday mishap moments.
Digital dynamic OOH will show the bright side of life on rainy days, missed bus copy at bus stops and traffic copy on busy main roads.
We are aligning contextual copy to mishap moments across digital environments, such as pet-related copy against cat and dog videos on YouTube, dating copy on Tinder and specific dating programmes across All4 VOD and social media copy on Instagram.
A fashion online retail partnership with PrettyLittleThing will see inserts in deliveries to further contextually land our message. Each insert will include a voucher for a free packet of crisps.
The Walkers “Spud Squad” reactive taskforce will be on-hand to react with witty one-liners across social channels as the campaign progresses.