Campaign Trail is our evaluation of a few of the best latest creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns in the archives here.
Super Bowl LVIII was the most-watched telecast in U.S. history, delivering a nail-biting contest, a taut halftime show, a pop star romance and one other yr of celebrity-fueled, play-it-safe ads to greater than 123 million viewers.
On the promoting front, the months-long marathon leading up to the big game is a possibility for brands to preview their campaigns to construct buzz and get every possible cent of value out of their $7 million-for-30 seconds price tag. And while the crush of tweets and teasers is commonly tedious (a fact parodied by BMW… in a teaser for its ad featuring Christopher Walken), one brand made the most of the opportunity on the way to airing one among the night’s standout moments.
In the weeks leading up to the NFL championship, CeraVe teased its first Super Bowl ad with an immersive campaign across social and earned media. Instead of hiding the surprise for the big game, the L’Oréal skincare brand leaned into weirdness across Instagram videos, paparazzi photos, influencer unboxings and podcast appearances that asked the query: What does Michael Cera have to do with CeraVe?
The effort climaxed just days before the game with the launch of iamcerave.com and a minute-plus-long video that presented Cera as the mastermind behind the similarly named brand. Shot in the sort of dreamy perfume ads from the ‘90s and soundtracked by twinkling New Age music, the creative features the actor in quite a lot of scenarios — speaking with a narwhal, hanging with male models, climbing a mountain and serving as his own masseuse — as he asks consumers to “let my cream hydrate you.”
The brand then pushed back on Cera’s claim that he “is CeraVe” by assuring consumers that it “is and at all times has been developed with dermatologists.” On game day, a shorter version of Cera’s video was revealed to be the actor’s pitch to an unamused CeraVe board. The spot was one among the night’s most memorable and ranked as the best Super Bowl campaign on TikTok by ad research company DAIVID.
CeraVe developed and executed the campaign with the aid of WPP, led by Ogilvy PR North America. The effort represented an application of a shared view between brand and agency that great earned media amplifies paid media exponentially, according to Adam Kornblum, senior vp and global head of digital marketing at CeraVe.
“We each pushed one another to rewrite this grammar for the Super Bowl marketing,” Kornblum said. “It wasn’t really about an ad, it was about constructing a world, earned first, so when the ad hits, the story is on the market.”
Campaign development
The Cera-CeraVe connection began with social listening as Ogilvy sought out intelligence, insights and inspiration. A handful of Reddit posts over the years drew out the possible relationship between the actor and brand: not enough to represent a groundswell, but enough to show potential.
Beyond the similar names, the idea of getting Cera take credit for CeraVe tied right into a larger branding need. For years, CeraVe has leaned into its dermatology bona fides and the ingredient — ceramides — from which it takes its name. Recently, it has seen competitors leverage similar verbiage and lingo of their marketing. In the campaign, Cera serves as a stand-in for copycats.
“There’s so many layers of strategy and messaging which can be really aligned perfectly to the brand and what we want to say on a deeper level,” Kornblum said. “The name is a quite simple connection, but on a deeper-rooted level, there was a variety of storytelling to be said in all other ways to different audiences, especially people who find themselves in skincare.”
But regardless of how strong the idea, the campaign hinged on each CeraVe taking a giant creative swing and Cera agreeing to participate. After CeraVe was on board, Ogilvy pitched the idea to Cera, who loved it and even had preferred directors. His list included eventual helmers Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of production company Prettybird (and comedy duo Tim & Eric), who were perfect for the “fever dream concept” the agency hoped to film, said Charlotte Tansill, president of Ogilvy North America’s PR, social and influence practice.
“We took them through the script, told them about the social, we said this is actually a campaign that’s far larger than the spot — it’s as much about the surround sound because it is about the conclusion of the story,” Tansill said. “They were jazzed and understood immediately.”
Cutting through the clutter
Once the team for the final product was locked, Ogilvy set into motion a plan that followed CeraVe’s approach to constructing cultural relevance by being a social- and influencer-first brand, a technique that has made it Gen Z’s top skincare brand by a large margin, according to Piper Sandler’s latest “Taking Stock With Teens” report. The collaborative effort required not only one idea but myriad ideas across client and agency teams and social, influencer and PR experts to be generated and executed for various audiences and channels.
“Every touchpoint was just as essential as the ad itself, and I believe that’s really a critical thing,” Kornblum said. “The ask wasn’t just ‘make a Super Bowl ad and let’s construct some buzz around it,’ it was ‘let’s create a world.’”
In the end, what separated CeraVe’s campaign from the slog of teasers and trailers was a commitment to letting earned media lead the effort.
“Earned-first creativity is frightening, since you quit a way of control. If you create an asset and you then put it in paid media, you’re speaking at people, but on this case, we wanted to create an experience that was participatory, that that was built to be shared, co-owned and co-created,” Tansill explained. “It’s an enormous testament to L’Oréal and CeraVe for taking this kind of risk because that’s often what stands in the way of quality work.”
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