• by Laura Rowan , Columnist, June 1, 2017

As a sneak peek at the 2017 North American Effie Awards, MediaPost and Effie Worldwide have once again collaborated to showcase some of the winning cases that will be awarded gold, silver or bronze Effies at the gala tonight. This series focuses on learning and best practices from the Media Effie categories. 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.

2017 EFFIE Award Preview: A new media model to transform a brand that sucks

Category: Media Effie: Media Idea

Client: The Hershey Company (Jolly Rancher)

Agency: Anomaly (with contributing agency Universal McCann)

Title: A new media model to transform a brand that sucks

Challenge: At the close of 2015, Jolly Rancher was stuck in a 4-year period of stagnation. The hard candy was struggling in a category growing 4% annually. The strategic challenge was clear - while Jolly Rancher was a candy that evoked nostalgia from today’s youth, it was overlooked in our modern world. Better advertising would help, but to actually return Jolly Rancher to growth, we needed to radically change how the brand behaved in the new era of communications. 

Our mission was to modernize the brand by implementing a new communication model that was nimble and smart enough to counter declining media spends and low share of voice.

Solution: From our research, we saw that Jolly Rancher existed in the moments that sucked: The principal’s candy bowl, the exam hall, and on long card rides with parents. As a hard candy, Jolly Rancher could own its “sucking” truth by celebrating the moments that suck the most.

Despite a declining media budget year over year, we had to come up with a new communication model that would allow us to be relevant to our audience and be present in every moment that sucked. The idea, #KeepOnSucking was a media led idea that was powerful enough to become the genesis of the communications program itself.

And at the core of the communication program was the Internet. It became our primary platform to push out “sucky” content and furthered the fuel for Jolly Ranchers communication strategy. We used social listening and data analytics to mine insights and optimize how and where Jolly Rancher should show up in our consumer’s lives. This model enabled a new communications approach that was truly nimble, highly contextual and hyper-targeted for real time.

1. An Answer Built for Internet Culture: We created the animated Jolly Rancher Fruit Gang to remind today’s youth to #KeepOnSucking.

2. Prolific ‘Always Ready’ Creativity & Production: We brought all production in-house, with executions turned around in a matter of hours.

3. Publisher, Not Advertiser: In light of a declining total media spend of 18% (from YA) we orchestrated a massive redistribution of funds to digital.

4. Multi-platform Take-overs for Key “Sucky” Moments: Jolly Rancher doubled down on key sucky scenarios with the most natural social conversation using new media to surround the consumer and blurring the lines of digital and real world activations.

5. Tailored TV Content for Pinnacle “Sucky” Moments: Sometimes a moment sucked enough to justify TV spend. For example, in September of 2015, our daily social monitoring informed us that Todd Gurley, the NFL’s #1 Draft Pick, loved Jolly Rancher. We created a “Being A Rookie Sucks” initiative, which aired during NFL games.

Results: Our cost-effective media idea revolutionized the brand’s voice by disrupting traditional production and media approaches to distribute 3,500 pieces of content. This campaign restored Jolly Rancher’s core, igniting previously stagnant candy sales by +10% in just 11 months. Best of all, Jolly Rancher’s hero, 7 oz. bag of hard candy, increased its base velocity by +27%.