Axe sells body spray, deodorants and shower gel. In Messenger, participants challenged one another for a game of Truth or Dare through spinning a bottle of Axe.
Axe launches a new scent every year and in the spring of 2008 Axe Dark Temptation made its debut on the market with the help of Axe – Wheel of Temptation. The goal of this digital investment was to strengthen the Axe brand and increase knowledge about the new product. The communication was based on the insight that guys like to feel that they are irresistible to girls.
The target group of Axe consists of young men between 14 and 24 years. Typical for these young men is their constant presence in communities like Facebook, Bilddagboken (The Picture Diary) and Lunarstorm, daily chatting in Messenger, and their tireless need of entertainment. Surveys showed that the target group “hates” advertisements, but when we dug a bit deeper, we found out that what they really hated was “irritating things that are disturbing”.
Therefore, one of the challenges was to create an advertisement that was truly relevant in the eyes of this picky target group. What happened before on the school yard has now moved into digital channels. In other words the field has changed, but how young people feel and behave still stays the same.
Axe – Wheel of Temptation is a Spin the Bottle game that is integrated in the chat platform Windows Live Messenger.
We chose the popular activities “Spin the Bottle” and “Truth or Dare” – games, which are based on the desire to get to know and challenge the opposite sex. We also knew that the target group spends between 3 and 6 hours a day on Messenger and hence we came up with a solution.
The user chooses the game in the game menu, spins the Axe-bottle, and answers the questions or completes the challenges – directly in the chat window. The intriguing categories are Plague or cholera, Sex, Personal, Dare or Embarrassing.
We quickly noticed that the right message to the right target group in the right place did the trick. Measurements after 6 months showed:
Unique visitors: 630 000
Rounds of game: 1 600 000
Time per round of game: 5.57 minutes
This means that Axe had reached out to 16 % of all young people in Sweden between 14 and 24 years of age. Commitment was high, something that, among other things, was indicated by the average time spent on playing the game (5.57 minutes).
The game was launched on 1 July 2008. During the period May to September Axe sales increased by 11% compared to the same period the year before. Compared to the previous period (October – April) the increase in sales was 34%. Axe – Wheel of Temptation was nominated as finalist in Eurobest and One Show, won third prize in Månadens Webb and a silver medal in Microsoft’s game “Catch a Mouse”.
© 2012 Deasign AB
