OVERVIEW

Yakult’s campaign for the 12 years old Gut Week awareness campaign delivered record media and public response results.

A creative, highly visual approach produced almost 400 pieces of coverage and a staggering 150% increase in direct public responses.

OBJECTIVES

•Raise awareness of good gut health amongst the general public in the UK via news creation, media coverage and generating word-on-mouth/ online buzz.
•Drive traffic to Loveyourgut.com and encourage people to download/ order an information pack.
•Generate positive coverage in (based on previous years) at least: 2 x national press; 10 x regional press; 5x consumer magazines; 15 x online

CHALLENGES

1.How do you create a story about the gut that is interesting and engaging to a nation that doesn’t enjoy talking or hearing about digestive problems?
2.How do you make people sit up and take notice without being off-putting, overly shocking or trivialising the serious message about gut health and digestive diseases?
3.How do you sustain interest and engagement through the whole week rather than for just one day?

STRATEGY

Note: Gut Week is a charity-based, public education week supported by Yakult as part of its CSR activity, therefore, there were no commercial objectives (eg. product sales) linked to the week.

•We made Gut Week relevant to virtually every Brit and topical for the media by choosing the theme of summer over-indulgence... focussing particularly on the great British barbecue.
•To inject our theme and message with additional medical credibility we recruited a respected and well-known UK media doctor (Dr Christian Jessen) as our spokesperson.
•The digestive charities were lined up to provide further credible comment.
•To ensure we achieved sustained coverage/buzz through out the week we adopted a staged media relations strategy so that long-lead and short-lead coverage appeared during the week.

CAMPAIGN EXECUTION

News Creation –Getting some killer stats for our story:
•Surveyed 3,000 people to reveal the effects of summertime over-indulgence.
•Found that Brits were carrying a staggering 23 million stone in excess weight –that’s over 16lbsper person... mostly in the stomach area!
•A typical Brit had consumed: 56 sausages; 54 burgers; 31 ice creams; and 81 pints of beer at barbecues across the nation.
•Results were packaged into a national a several regional-specific stories.

Photocall –Making our story come to life:
•Staged a photocall with Dr Christian Jessen surrounded by all of the food eaten by the average Brit over the summer barbecue season.
•Pictures and stats distributed to media and interviews offered.

RESULTS

Coverage (exceeded targets by 400%):
•398 pieces of print, broadcast and online coverage including 5 national media, 5 consumer magazines, 35 regional newspapers.
•A total circulation of 120,186,767.
•Articles in appeared in big reach media outlets throughout the week eg. Daily Mirror, The People, Manchester Evening News, Western Mail, Women’s Fitness, Essentials, AOL Online and GMTV.
•100% of coverage was positive and included ‘Love Your Gut’.Public response:
•Visits to loveyourgut.com increased by 50%.
•150% year-on-year increase in number of people ordering/ downloading information pack (up to 5,000 from 2000 last year).
•Messages on 63 Facebook groups (combined membership of 226,000).

A very happy client:
“The team at Red approached the Gut Week project with great energy and drive taking a ‘multi-pronged’ approach. They achieved excellent national and regional press results and explored new angles such as web TV and social networking, bringing Gut Week to the online community on a far larger scale than ever before.

“From working with Yakult to set the initial campaign strategy / angle, to creating media materials, to delivering results, the team at Red have been consistently professional, enthusiastic and creative, and we are delighted with the results.”

Sonya Hayden, Yakult UK LtdRecipes –Providing practical advice:
•Worked with celebrity chef (Anthony Worrell Thompson) to create gut-friendly recipes.
•Some were given in advance to weekly and monthly magazines and readers were directed to loveyourgut.com where more recipes could be downloaded.

Facebook –Creating buzz, spreading word-of-mouth:
•Identified relevant Facebookgroups (health; wellbeing; diet; fitness) and wrote messages on their walls for all users to read.
•Directed users to the LYG.com website to download info packs, advice and recipes.