‘The GoTime potty-training app’ won Gold in Content Retail and Consumer at The Drum Awards. This campaign by Drum OMG aimed to connect Andrex with young families by addressing the stress of potty training through nostalgia, using a re-recorded UK garage track and a viral music video to engage parents and drive 21,600 app downloads.
Whilst Andrex might be a trusted household name, when it came to young families it meant little more than toilet paper. In order to build better connections with this audience and deliver on its mission to improve children’s hygiene habits, Andrex needed to become a trusted partner in key developmental points in a child’s life.
The 'GoTime' potty-training app was the perfect opportunity for the brand to help during a critical developmental milestone…but only if we could get parents to listen. We needed to show that the brand understood the audience and the realities of the potty-training experience, but it was of the utmost importance that we did this in a way that would encourage them to lean in rather than turn off if we wanted to get them downloading the app.
The objectives for our campaign were to:
Parents are already overwhelmed with advice. So much so that it results in stress and leads them to postponing potty-training altogether. According to a report by Kindred, one in four children in England and Wales aren’t toilet trained when they start school. If we were going to help, we couldn’t just add to the noise with more well-intentioned information.
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A factual approach was likely to cause parents to turn away at the first sign of the subject, and we knew that we would get lost amongst parental portals that are already awash with advice and resources. We had to approach it differently if we were going to succeed, so the question was: how do you get already-stretched parents to engage with a subject they are actively avoiding?
When faced with stressful situations, turning to positive memories of the past can be a source of comfort and pleasure. With over 60% of our millennial audience nostalgic for the 1990s and the 2000s, this unlocked the key to our approach.
The conventional response to solving a potty-training problem would be to look at parenting platforms and personalities that are speaking about the subject regularly. However, we knew we had to look beyond the world of parenting if we wanted anyone to listen.
Stepping out of the parent-verse altogether, we looked to the world of music instead. We took a certified anthem from our millennial parents’ youth to grab their attention and used it as the vehicle to talk to them about the potty-training experience in a surprising, fun and relatable way.
Working with UK garage legends DJ Pied Piper and the Masters of Ceremonies, we re-recorded their classic early 00’s track ‘Do You Really Like It?’ with a toilet-themed twist, using humour to share the relatable ups and downs of potty training.
We worked closely with the group to re-record the vocals for ‘Do You Really Like It?’ Our lyrics told a true-to-life story about the relatable realities of potty-training, whilst staying true to the inimitable style of the MCs.
Once we had the song, we created an equally attention-grabbing music video. Creating a larger-than-life bathroom set to bring the track to life, our video was brimming with easter egg references and nods to the UK garage era, not to mention a 12ft-toilet and even a life-sized toilet roll costume ¬– There’s no way our audience could ignore that!
The full-length video and cutdowns were the driving force of our campaign. Catching our audience as they took a break from parenting, they played out on social media, driving conversation and getting the lyrics into people’s heads.
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Making sure our impact stretched further on social, we then targeted the tastemakers who already had the authority and ear of our audience. We worked with a selection of parenting influencers on TikTok, sending out bespoke kits that included portable potties and more information about the track. Our parenting influencers shared the song with their followers, adding their own first-hand commentary about the app and their potty-training experiences to increase relatability.
However, if we wanted to make sure our song took on a life of its own we couldn’t stop there, so we made sure we got the song in front of our young families audience throughout the summer by taking it to the audience. A key component of this was our partnership with the UK’s #1 family rave event, 'Raver Tots'. Finding the perfect overlap between parents of young kids and a nostalgic love for the music, we couldn’t have found a better match. We showed up at four 'Raver Tots' festivals across the UK over the next few months. Our video played out on the main stage between legendary UK garage acts, whilst Andrex goodie bags were given out on-site.
Our young families audience understood the campaign immediately and the video quickly caught fire online. During the summer, over 18.3 million people watched our video and got the conversation going, racking up over 369,000 engagements on social. We had most definitely got our parents to pay attention and engage with the subject matter.
The campaign didn’t just get people talking though, it got people searching out and downloading the 'GoTime' app too. During the campaign period, we delivered 21,600 downloads of the app – that was 49% of their total app downloads to-date and a huge 210% increase in first-time downloads over the preceding period, successfully hitting the 50K app download target.
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Beyond the immediate response, we were also able to drive the longer-term impacts that we needed. With +15.9% ad recall, our video had proved memorable enough to stick in people’s mind. Even more than that, we were able to get our young families audience on our side with +4.3% in favourability.
The success of the campaign is summed up perfectly by many of the comments we received, like this one from @Penzzz:
“This beat got me through GCSEs now it’ll get me through the first years of motherhood”
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