Creative review: Andrex Washlets campaign
It’s a pre-requisite for brands these days to deliver their calls to actions through as many different channels as possible – loud and all-inclusive is the mantra of the moment, especially where the wonderful world of social media is concerned.
And yet there are brands for which the best advice would have been to run the TV ad, amplify it with some solid sampling, and then leave the brand proposition to do the rest.
For me, one of those brands is currently Andrex Washlets.
The campaign targets young women with a push that aims to shift perception of the moist toilet tissue category by moving conversation away from the humdrum of personal cleanliness and into the more girly world of health and beauty. Raising awareness of the Washlets brands is intrinsic to the activity, naturally.
It’s quite a mission – after all, we’re talking adult wet wipes here, without the benefit of any cute brand ambassador puppies. As you’d expect from a brand with a marketing heritage as strong as Andrex’s, the campaign succeeds... but only up to a point.
Execution is through ad spots aired mainly on Channel 4, sampling and the now ubiquitous online strand. The first two channels are totally appropriate for Washlets. The choice of a kooky Dawn Porter, doing kooky things in perfectly normal environments to get people talking about bottom cleanliness, is inspired.
Mindshare’s move to limit execution mainly to Channel 4 shows its understanding not only of Washlets’ target market, but also the conversation. And there’s no better way than sampling to get people hooked on NPD, especially when it has been heavily pushed through in-store promotional activity as well as via the websites of participating outlets.
Where it lets itself down is in its online strategy. Longer versions of the TV ads and specially commissioned online videos and blogs are the backbone of the Washlets' Clean Campaign Facebook page. Yet as Dawn Porter realises in one of her weekly video blogs, people don’t really want to be talking about moist tissue or their toilet habits. There’s a limit to what you can say on this particular topic, and fundamentally, people don’t want to say what little there is on the Clean Campaign FB wall. Which, coupled with the almost guaranteed risk of ridicule, in turn begs the question of why would anyone would want to ‘like’ the FB page in the first place.
As a result, Andrex now uses most of its FB wall to promote generic beauty prizes as part of its daily competition. And because Clean Campaign has no link to the Washlets brand, any resonance or brand association will quickly become tenuous.
Video is a very important part of this campaign – this is the element that has created noise in the blogosphere, though largely of the bemused sort – so wouldn’t a premium branded YouTube page have been a more appropriate use of media? Not only would it have been a better medium for Porter’s cheeky sense of fun, it would have had the advantage of discretion.
All in all, it feels as though this is a campaign which started with an idea about getting people to ‘normalise’ moist toilet tissue through talking about it. End of. Any considered online content strategy doesn’t seem to have figured at all, which is a shame given the campaign’s other strengths.
Perhaps Andrex acknowledges this: tellingly, the campaign isn’t showcased on the brand owner’s own website at all.