• by Jacklyn Baillergeon , Columnist, May 26, 2017

Category: Media Effie: Media Idea

Client: Mayborn Group (Tommee Tippee)

Agency: McCann New York (with contributing agencies 360 Public Relations and Mediaworks)

Title: Advice Wipes

Challenge: Baby care brands survive on recommendations from other parents. The more parents talk about your product, the more new parents buy them. No wonder five years after its 2010 U.S. introduction, Tommee Tippee represented less than 10% market share. We were losing the sales war because we were a UK brand that most people in the U.S. had not ever heard of.

We set out to do three things:

1. Be known— increase spontaneous mentions of the brand.
2. Be carried—close a deal with another major retail partner.
3. Be used— increase TT brand sales.

We needed to reach first time parents-to-be, between their second trimester of pregnancy and delivery. Because that’s when impending parenthood starts to sink in.

Parenthood gets real once moms and dads-to-be pass the first trimester. They start telling others they’re expecting, see a glimpse of a sonogram, and they start buying things. Cribs and strollers and bassinets and bouncy swings and baby tubs and car seats and diaper pails and outlet covers and baby gates and footie rompers and bottles and teething toys and that’s not even half of it. Which is why they rely on other’s advice for what to buy. 

Solution: Parenting advice that’s meant to be helpful tends to be very overwhelming. As soon as parents-to-be announce their pregnancy, they become inundated with advice from everyone, everywhere, about everything—often unsolicited. 

Surprisingly, no baby care brand had yet to do anything about it.

So we did. We called bulls**t on the overwhelming unsolicited parenting advice new parents are bombarded with, turning unwanted advice into something useful: advice wipes. 

We scoured for printed words of advice (blogs, books, etc.) and gathered as much of it as we could. Then, to make those words into something useful for parents, created 250 boxes of baby wipes made out of the mountains of advice, recording the messy making-of process from the factory floor.

We offered the wipes to influencers and members of the media who understood the pressures of parenthood driven by too much advice. We found them by combing all kinds of online text—blogs, articles, and forums to name a few—for keywords and phrases that identified them as sympathizers to our cause.

We combined our factory floor video footage with footage demonstrating a new mother being inundated by advice—and fighting back against it—into a video we aired on YouTube and social media, to reach soon-to-be parents across America and let them know that we, Tommee Tippee, get that it’s overwhelming, and encouraged them to “Parent On.” With our Parent On site, we gave them a platform to come together and encouraged them to trust themselves. We started the conversation with empowering statements like, “Humans survived 200,000 years before any baby book was ever published.”

Results:

1. Be known— increase spontaneous mentions of the brand by 58%, at the expense of our competitors.
2. Be carried—inked a deal with Walmart.
3. Be used— increase TT brand sales 12%.

Effie Awards are known by advertisers and agencies globally as the pre-eminent award in the marketing industry and recognize any and all forms of communication that contribute to a brand's success. Gold, silver and bronze Effie winners will be announced at the 2017 North American Effie Awards gala on June 1 in New York.