As the recent heatwave turned New York’s
subway system into its own kind of hell, Degree Deodorant decided to let the straphangers themselves write the campaign.
It took over multiple stations, renaming them with the exact words
commuters were already using.
West Fourth Street got rebranded as “Sweat Central.” Union Square became “the Boiler Room.” And Herald Square South got launched as
“Molten Core.”
The campaign is “based on a very simple consumer truth,” says Chris Symmes, the brand’s head of marketing. “Every New Yorker has a story
about surviving the subway in the summer. And over the last five to six years, the heatwaves in New York have become more extreme.”
That has meant more online chatter. “When we saw
so many New Yorkers joking and venting on social media, we decided to tap into an existing conversation rather than trying to start a new one.”
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The station takeovers also included a
train wrap. The one-off campaign then extended itself with creators for an integrated ecosystem that stretched beyond the out-of-home component.
The local effort fits squarely under the
brand’s national umbrella, called “Here for sweat.”
Subways, he tells Marketing Daily, are “all about heat, movement, and sweat, and Degree is specifically
built for those moments. This environment is a perfect real-world product demonstration for the brand.”
Because Degree is already the No. 1 brand in the U.S., the effort had less to do
with awareness than reminding sweaty subway riders that it’s a brand ready to meet the moment, and greeted riders during the recent stretch, where the Big Apple’s air temps rose as high as
101.5°F, and underground readings felt like 108°.
For Degree, campaign success is “about whether we are reaching consumers in a meaningful, relevant way, while reinforcing what
Degree stands for. The New York City subway is just such a perfect example of movement, heat, and hustle all come together, and that's really a fantastic way for the brand to play a unique role in
commuters' lives.”