BCMA Global Lockdown Content Showcase: Best In Class - Italy
As part of the BCMA Global Lockdown Content Showcase, we have created a series of interviews conducted by Rebecca Allen, BCMA Global Board Director, with the key people behind the campaigns that were voted 'Best In Class'.
We hear from Vincenzo Piscopo, Head of Branded Content & Originals at Ciao People who created the campaign for Reckitt Benckiser's Napisan brand.
Please can you describe your relationship with Napisan and Reckitt Benckiser?
We met RB and Napisan managers a few years ago, and we began this ongoing partnership involving not only Napisan brand (all products included), but also all the other brands of the RB group for the Hygiene Home division. This is a primarily branded content partnership oriented, as branded content is the product in which both our partners and us strongly believe; they chose our editorial group for the strong coherence we tend to ensure between branded contents and the editorial ones, this is the key to reach our audience in a very natural way. It’s a partnership based on a mutual idea of trust and purpose, and continuity in collaboration is the demonstration of this point, we can only appreciate it.
Can you explain what the Essay in the Classroom campaign was about?
The Essay rooted in the project “Igiene Insieme” on which Napisan and their scientific and scholastic partners were working on, producing materials to inform about the anti Covid-19 correct hygiene rules. The project spoke to young students from primary school, parents and teachers from all the Italian regions in which traditional schools were transformed into a new distance learning process. Napisan asked us to spread the project and its rules to create awareness, in an immediate and clear way, easily shareable from our community including parents, and from teachers to their students during online lessons.
Thus, we had the idea of an Essay written and told by people concerned: a class of young students.
In March, when all over the world people faced the global lock down due to pandemic Covid-19, we kept in touch with a primary school class of children. Their teacher told us how her young students were living their daily routine at home, in that so-called “new normal”. So we tried to show this new normal also characterized by all those new habits, such as washing hands in a correct way to prevent the infection, that Napisan promotes through the “Igiene Insieme” project.
How did you overcome the challenges of lockdown when producing this?
Suddenly we lived the experience to change all our usual production processes because of pandemic Covid-19; it didn’t exist a proper protocol for this yet.
We decided to unload the production set assets, without sacrificing the creative ones.
As a result, this branded video was integrated into a distribution context on which, through social networks, people got used to the fruition of content in video calls. That's why our community accepted video as “normal” without any disruption in terms of format, and so their focus/attention was only on the message we needed to share.
What value do you think this provided?
We believe this provided a double value on different levels: we supported, with original content, both our community and the school staff, during an uncertain and isolated period. At the same time, we made our audience aware of all those good hygiene rules of collective interest, promoting the brand message of Napisan.
What feedback did you get from your client?
They were really satisfied with the simple and efficient result we reached working together.
Our common aim was to tell the “new normal” from children's points of view, showing their daily routine and including the brand message with the importance of the hygiene rules appliance. We needed to do it in a lighter way, using an easy language, in order to entertain our audience with an empathic video, well received by both our community and our client.
What audiences were you hoping to engage?
Primarily we wanted to engage parents (mothers and fathers) able to drive the message by sharing the video with their children interested in it. Nevertheless, the video was thought also for teachers and they shared it during the online lessons, as an instrument of education and entertainment for their students.
What were the results of this (eg. uplift in brand sentiment)?
This video reached 1.4 million video views, a social reach of more than 3 million, with high
engagement rate especially due to social shares. Moreover, we observed a very positive sentiment from our community: they appreciated the video itself, the message we gave, the role of children and the brand participation as the activator of this hygiene process from house to school. Our community revealed not only a learning lesson as the first function of video, but also an empathic recognition and an entertainment instrument for all ages.
Do you have any plans do to develop this idea further?
This video is part of a wider edutainment plan to make people from our community, parents and teachers, aware about topics of collective interest, such as proper hygiene in the case of this project. Our ambition is to restart, after this pandemic period, with traditional video productions using classic assets, but always with a great attention to creativity.
Are there any future content campaigns you can tell us about?
This project is part of a structured campaign with other textual and video contents, showing the school world and that “new normal” from different points of view according to all subjects involved: young students, parents, teachers.
Because of the ongoing pandemic period, we are still producing videos with remote solutions and new creative and production ideas.
Finally, do you have any advice for other brands in this area?
Our advice for brands is to focus on valuable storytelling in their communication. In our opinion, brands should live this particular moment as the good chance to communicate in a different way, staying next to people/consumers, with the right attention to the current social context.