The PromaxBDA: The Conference session, “Integrated Marketing, Creative Solutions and What’s Next,” on Wednesday, June 19, at 4:45 p.m., explores the evolution of how marketers are balancing content, creative and strategy and seamlessly blurring the lines between marketing the channel or program brand, the consumer brand and content.

Over the next three days, as we near the session, PromaxBDA presents a series of sports marketing case studies featuring memorable brand integrations from the past year. In our second study, Unilever’s Axe goes straight to the moon with the NCAA and other brands:

Unilever’s Axe grooming division is known as an irreverent brand that seeks like-minded young, male consumers. Axe is currently running a promotion that is offering people the opportunity to attend Axe Apollo Space Camp, with the ultimate aim to find one person who will be offered the chance to travel to space on a real flight with international space agency SXC.

Under the auspices of its CEO Michiel Mol, SXC operates XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx reusable suborbital space plane, which beginning in 2014 is scheduled to take passengers “more than 100 kilometers into space, achieving astronaut status.” Axe’s campaign, complete with the tagline, “Leave a Man. Come Back a Hero,” began national awareness with a press conference led by Buzz Aldrin, the second man (behind Neil Armstrong) to step on the Moon. That was soon followed by a TV spot this past February during Super Bowl XLVII, in which a young woman’s life is saved from drowning by a hunky lifeguard. But her attention is instead captured by an astronaut who walks onto the beach.

Axe then broke a TV spot during the NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament, in which actual footage from a March Madness game in 1998 between Valparaiso University and Mississippi is interrupted when Axe’s astronaut walks onto the court. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” real CBS-TV announcer Verne Lundquist yells. “There is an astronaut on the court. What a moment. It does not get any better than this!”

The campaign then moved to the race track, with actual scenes of Dario Franchitti winning his third Indy 500. But here, his pit crew bypasses celebrating with Franchitti to mob the Axe Astronaut. “There is an astronaut on the track,” screams the announcer. “Unbelievable!”

Barry Janoff is director of sports media marketing initiatives for PromaxBDA. He also is the executive editor for NYSportsJournalism.com which covers national sports marketing, business and media news; and a contributing writer for Yahoo! and MediaPost.

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