PHD Italy accepts their Effie award
PHD Italy took home a gold and the prestigious Grand Effie at the Effie Italy Awards 2019, both awarded for their ‘L’Asteroide’ campaign for Buondì Motta.
The inaugural Effie Italy Awards ceremony was held in Milan, in collaboration with Google, Nielsen and Accenture. The Effies awarded four Gold, three Silver, five Bronze, and the top award of the night – the Grand Effie.
The Effies aim to reward ideas that produce effective marketing campaigns, with top level communications, as well as enhanced results. They are judged on their objectives, strategy, creativity and application.
PHD Italy’s ‘L’Asteroide’ campaign was awarded Gold by the jury, and top honours on the night when the campaign beat off all the other award winners to pick up the Grand Effie.
PHD Italy’s award winning campaign in brief:
Background
After 60 years for Buondì as Italy’s traditional breakfast bread, PHD produced a groundbreaking campaign to attract not only new digitally savvy families and millenials, but to also generate a huge buzz and conversation around Buondì, increasing sales by no less than +8–10%.
Creative
The 9 million digital-savvy families and millennials were tired of the old Italian family stereotypes and needed different and more contemporary commercials, ones that spoke a more digital and ironic language. So we created a hyper-conservative campaign, but with a difference: we used an asteroid to destroy all the most typical clichés of Italian TV breakfast ads. We started by killing the mother of our ad!
Strategy
We wanted to attract the aforementioned 9 million, while provoking the other 11 million traditional families. We created our commercials using all the clichés of breakfast ads, but with a deadly, unexpected twist: the killer asteroid.
Execution
The ads: In a most typical country-house, a cute young lady asks her perfect and cheerful mother for a ‘light, but tempting’ breakfast. So far, nothing new…but then an asteroid crashes in the garden, killing the mother. This was outrageous for Italian Catholic, family-based commercials. Our second commercial killed the father. And in the third, the asteroid killed an old postman passing by.
The commercials were posted on our digital media channels simultaneously with TV, and we fuelled the offline/online conversations and arguments, generating thousands of interactions, memes and parodies.
Results
The Asteroid campaign reached over 17.5 million people, with an engagement rate of 12%.
The complete views so far total 8.5 million, with the user interactions at more than 360,000.
The campaign was mentioned over 400 times in the Italian press, and on radio and TV shows, in just one week. The sales of Buondì increased by 30%, going far beyond the +8–10% increase requested. The killer asteroid campaign made Buondì rise from dead and entered Italian pop culture as “might an asteroid strike me” became a common saying.
