Case: SK-II
How SK-II took a gold medal with their 2020 Olympics sponsorship by bringing their brand platform ‘Change Destiny’ to the next level during a global pandemic.
Challenge
This was SK-II's biggest ever multi-market campaign, covering 8 markets and over 6 months of live campaigning. The brand was one of only 12 gold sponsors at the Tokyo Olympics 2020, and the lead brand for the P&G group. The global pandemic (COVID-19) added an additional layer of complexity and volatility, which made agility essential in the constantly pivoting cultural landscape.
As the lead global orchestration partner, Mano was tasked with integrating and strategising the execution of 15+ different agency partners working across three key markets (Japan, USA and China). Additionally, Mano worked with the central brand team as well as local market team, to build a unified campaign strategy that could also be adapted and localized for maximum market impact. Mano also orchestrated activation planning, including content and activation planning across all levels of media (paid, owned, earned, shared) across many different media agency partners. This materialized into a marketing programme of three core campaigns, split into three phases with hundreds of pieces of assets, messages, influencers, media partners and activations - all orchestrated into clear roadmaps and playbooks that provided clarity, transparency, and direction for all stakeholders, as we looked to achieve our shared vision of getting one billion views across our content mix.
Our key challenges can be categorised into 3 main areas:
Cutting through brand clutter during a hyper-competitive moment, ensuring multi-market contextualisation and localisation of narrative and insights.
Orchestrate a highly complex agency matrix throughout three very different markets and integrate them into a unified model with smooth processes, from campaign development to execution.
Maximise the longevity and impact of over 40 digital brand assets across a four months’ campaign roadmap
Ensure SK-ll would reach its executive goal of getting attention from over 1 billion eyeballs around the world
Solution
SK-ll was looking to fully integrate its brand and campaign activation model – to become more insight-led, more activation-focused and ultimately more consumer-centric via a 360 always-on approach.
Campaign Orchestration “The 360 Integrated Model”:
Mano introduced and developed a new orchestration approach in partnership with SK-ll and in close collaboration with the plethora of 15+ agencies across 3 markets. The model had to be fundamentally "lean and agile", as SK-ll is a relatively small team, considering the size of the business, with no internal GTM disciplines.
This new operating model was enabled through a new approach to always-on insights and connecting creative approaches with activation insights in the campaign development process. Activation and insights were used during and after the creative development to better qualify the creative idea, as well as extend the activation potential of the creative execution.
The Integrated Agency Team approach for One brand consumer experience:
Since activation thinking was brought into the campaign development process much earlier than usual, we needed to ensure the creative idea could be matched by equally great activation ideas. For this to work, we needed all activation specialists and agencies to converge on the same principles for how we go to market, centred on the same objectives, insights, and approach to strategy.
Feeling the Pulse:
An entirely new way of managing campaigns live was created, via what we call Pulse Reporting — A tool to manage and report results to Start Stop Scale campaign and channel behaviour for maximum success. The pulse report enables all functions and stakeholders to have a unified source of truth on how the campaign was behaving during a weekly drumbeat meeting.
The Winning Big Bet
Tentpole Thinking & Pull-First Activation Model:
To ensure that SK-ll achieves their ambitions to become more consumer relevant and increase their purpose engagement efforts, we worked with them to develop a new tribe and community pull approach rooted in activation-centricity.
In partnership with SK-ll, we developed an entirely new approach to the campaign, designed to ensure tribe, cultural and consumer relevance at all stages of campaign development. This is the model that helped SK-ll develop the most successful brand campaign in its history.
Moreover, we have adapted the global approach to campaigns with bespoke market-first deployment, based on both local mechanics and consumer behaviour. This created high impact and engagement from the media and the public alike.
Impact
SK-II’s Olympic campaign achieved record-high results, becoming the most watched and most covered SK-II campaign in history, and celebrated as one of the best Tokyo Olympics campaigns by industry media.
The campaign exceeded expectations and clocked up 1.1 billion views and 2300+ PR mentions across markets, making it the most successful SK-II campaign to date.
The videos received highly positive social media sentiment and over 5.5 million engagements.
The campaign was named as one of the best Tokyo Olympic campaigns by the Drum1.
It was featured in The Future 100 report created by Wunderman Thompson for its virtual brand world SK-II City, created as part of the campaign.