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Kleenex cleans up with Ad Impact Award

Bum wiping and high fashion are fairly strange bedfellows. But Kleenex’s Paper Dresses campaign has been mixing the two surprisingly well since it launched in 2009. And the final cog in this year’s nine-month campaign, which upped the ante thanks to a collaborative effort between Ogilvy, Kimberly-Clark and TVNZ, has come out on top of the September round of Colmar Brunton’s Ad Impact Award. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sdrejih1dA“Who on Earth would have thought that the
humble roll of toilet paper could look so good?,” 
asks Harriet Dixon, senior account manager at Colmar Brunton. “A dress made out of toilet paper is quite a talking point. This ad is an all-round great performer, beating our norms on all three impact measures. Creating an emotional connection with the brand and leading to a strong intent to purchase.” 

The TV ad, which was produced by TVNZ, revealed the winning dress, which
was also one of three creations from New Zealand Fashion Tech students that were paraded down the catwalk at New Zealand Fashion Week.

“I’m stoked to see Kleenex Cottonelle pick up this month’s award,” says Ogilvy’s executive director Paul Manning. “Paper Dresses was a great partnership between Ogilvy, TVNZ, New Zealand Fashion Tech and our clients Kimberly-Clarke. Our idea really honours the wonderful talents of these young fashion designers. This campaign has been a great vehicle to connect their unique design qualities directly with the Kleenex Cottonelle tissue product in a new and memorable way.”

When we spoke with Jason Biggs, senior brand manager at Kimberly-Clark, a while back, he said the aim of the campaign was to broaden the exposure and appeal of Paper Dresses and create audience engagement in Kleenex Cottonelle toilet paper’s ‘supplier partner’ sponsorship of New Zealand Fashion Week.

But this year, to really drive home that message, the partners sought an execution that would speak to the brand’s target audience across a more diverse range of channels.

To do that, they created three stages of an integrated advertising, sponsorship, online and PR campaign running from February to October—the result of which, Biggs said, has “made the story even more relevant to a wider audience”.

The first stage ran from March to May and involved the Kleenex Cottonelle brand sponsoring the final season of Desperate Housewives in a bid to reset the conversation it was having with the market.

From May to September, nine mini webisodes charting the journey of three of the designers were shot and are available to view online at TVNZ. Media solutions business development manager at TVNZ, Jodine Small, says Ogilvy and Kimberly-Clark came to TVNZ with the concept and they worked together to come up with a series of nine 30-second programettes that followed the highs and lows of three students as they embarked on the challenge. 

“We shot it in a documentary style and drove viewers to longer-form content at a custom built mini-site housed within tvnz.co.nz. The result is an entertaining series where the viewer is engaged with the brand throughout the journey of each student.”

Small adds the programettes have succeeded in building a new conversation platform for Kleenex Cottonelle by giving it a point of difference in what she describes as a “low-involvement but highly competitive category”.

As part of its public engagement strategy, this year the public was able to go online and vote on their favourite dress from the three finalists, Aucklanders Kapi Fonua and Kei Ho, and Wellingtonian Tanya Jeffrey.

The third and final stage of the campaign crops up in October with the airing of the final TVC and the sale on TradeMe of a cloth replica of the winning dress. 

Small says content integration is becoming more widely requested and accepted.

“We’re seeing new levels of integration into international and local shows and also creating specific content for brands. Great brands understand that the magic of television is in the storytelling which goes straight to the heart of viewers. And television is not just on one screen anymore—it’s on your computer, tablet or mobile.”

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