Gillette

Gillette was introducing the new Fusion ProGlide, its biggest razor launch in years. But guys who wet shave were skeptical about claims of superior comfort and reluctant to pay more. Proximity’s goal was to drive them to trial and make them believers, and the campaign encouraged converts to then spread the word through the ProGlide Challenge.

Gillette travelled across North America with mobile shave studios putting the razor into guys’ hands, and capturing footage of them becoming believers. These testimonials were seeded online and put into online advertising.

At the same time, the agency reached out to bloggers, Facebook fans and YouTube celebrities to give away thousands of samples using a custom sampling widget. And ProGlide converts were invited to become advocates on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Videos were uploaded to a holding database, where select clips were chosen to be shown on multiple digital platforms.

In under three months the campaign generated over 2.6 billion impressions through over 525 million impressions on Facebook, 900 million impressions through search, 23 million impressions with blog reviews and 4.4 million mentions on Twitter.

Awareness and trial was 4% higher than forecasted with repeat purchase 14% above target, and retail orders were 50% ahead of expectations.

The demand in North America was so high that the launch in Western Europe was delayed due to lack of supply, and in the U.S. the product sold at twice the MSRP online through Amazon, making the ProGlide campaign Gillette’s most successful product launch ever.