Campaign Summary

Clear Men saw the opportunity to leverage e-sports to connect with its audience and inspire this gaming enthusiast community to keep up their winning spirit. The brand wanted audiences to feel confident and inspired. Clear Men captured winning moments in e-sports by partnering with the 2019 Vietnam Championship Series Summer Season (VCS Spring 2019), an e-sports tournament.

Strategy

Objective and Context:

Shampoo brand Clear Men was struggling to connect with modern Vietnamese men, an audience that was not picky about their choice of shampoo. To adapt to changing times and successfully resonate with this audience, the brand needed to operate in a space that appealed to this younger generation.

Target Audience:

The new generation of Vietnamese men wants to succeed in life but faces challenges and societal pressures along their journey. A young Vietnamese man's success is portrayed in Vietnamese media as a stereotypically good-looking and perfect man. There is little room for failure or expression of what each man is truly passionate about and who he wants to become.

However, according to Clear Men, these men still believe that it is in their hands to define their own success. If they overcome the challenges that come their way to the best of their abilities, they can defy social pressures and rise above judgment.

Decoding the passion point of this audience revealed that the modern Vietnamese man is keen on playing video games and watching and participating in gaming championships. In fact, e-sports is one of the strongest rising trends in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

Creative Strategy:

According to Appota eSports, there are 26 million e-sport players in Vietnam, of which 90 percent are men. For instance, the game League of Legends has six million active users in Vietnam.

While e-sport players and gamers could be successful in Vietnam, they still faced challenges from societal barriers about stereotypical success. Society looked down upon these gamers and considered their success not sustainable and not worth recognizing.

Clear Men saw the opportunity to leverage e-sports to connect with its audience and inspire this gaming enthusiast community to keep up their winning spirit. With a promise to also keep them dandruff-free, the brand wanted them to feel confident and inspired, and never held back by societal constraints or preconceived ideas of success. Clear Men leveraged winning moments in e-sports by partnering with the 2019 Vietnam Championship Series Summer Season (VCS Spring 2019), an e-sports tournament. It also leveraged internet gaming shops where the brand's target audience congregates regularly.

Execution

Overall Campaign Execution:

To incorporate itself into the game League of Legends via VCS Spring 2019, Clear Men integrated the brand's spirit into the championship through a range of activities.

• Unique branded in-game animation: Clear Men branding appeared when all components of the game were killed, together with a "Swipe all" voiceover (game terminology), which strongly linked to the product's benefits. This helped build brand love among the gamer community and reaffirmed that Clear Men always endorses Vietnamese men to be successful in their own way.
• Shop transformation: Clear Men transformed 25,000 internet shops into the brand hub, where gamers could gather, play games, and cheer together for their favorite team player.

Mobile Execution:

A branded microsite featured a "prediction contest" for e-sports viewers to join and vote for their favorite team and cheer for the winner. The platform also provided a chance to win big prizes at the end of the contest.

Elements of the mobile strategy included:

• A UGC social mini-game encouraging users to create a campaign tagline by mixing the branded tagline and the game spirit in their own way.
• Clear Men livestream videos, PR articles, talk-show videos, and social posts to amplify the brand's message and wining spirit on the Garena platform across online channels (YouTube, Facebook, and website).
• A weekly prize for "Unbeatable Man of the Week" offered in the form of a Clear Men gift basket to inspire the player to keep up their performance in the championship.

Results (including context, evaluation, and market impact)

The campaign achieved a return on investment (ROI) of 1312 percent and surpassed key performance indicators (KPIs) across all platforms:

• 71.7 million views on live-streaming and VOD (145 percent vs. KPI)
• 19.6 million clicks on display banners via Garena website (220 percent vs. KPI)
• 19 million page views on Clear Men prediction micro-site (425 percent vs. KPI)
• 4.5 million views on 160 PR articles (115 percent vs. KPI)
• 473.4 million impressions at G-cafe internet shop via wallpaper and screensaver (106 percent vs. KPI)
• 100 percent of gamers remembered Clear Men's message: "100 percent unbeatable, swipe dandruff" (source: Brand Lift survey)
• 95 percent of the audience loved the brand and is looking forward to the next season with more activities