The Objective
If you’ve ever eaten a pack of Mentos or Fruitella, you’ve heard of Perfetti Van Melle, the world-renowned Italian confectioner behind these household names. When it launched Goleador Tricolor to help cheer up a traumatised Italian nation in 2020, it turned to TikTok to drive mass buzz and awareness with a new audience of digital natives.
The Solution
Perfetti Van Melle ran a Branded Hashtag Challenge, an ad format specifically designed to generate mass awareness, colourful engagement and a viral moment that both brands and fans can participate in together. To launch Goleador Tricolor, one of Italy’s most popular sweets, in the colours of the Italian flag, it created the #WeLoveTricolor challenge, in which users had to showcase their moves, whether through dancing or keepy-ups (as Goleador is strongly associated with football), to a bespoke soundtrack.
A central "challenge page" pools UGC entries in a single place for the campaign, along with a description and external link. A brand banner and trending hashtag on the Discover page both push users there, making it highly discoverable alongside swathes of user entries. As this was a shorter Branded Hashtag Challenge, running for only three days instead of six, Perfetti Van Melle used two One Day Max In-Feed Ads, featuring popular TikTok Creators, to help drive users towards the challenge. These ads run seamlessly in the For You feed and provide guaranteed bursts of high, organic exposure.
This creative was led by two established TikTok Creators, with a combined following of 2.7M+ followers (@zoemassenti, @jasongagliani). This is a great way to kickstart a campaign by tapping into existing audiences and drumming up explosive exposure. It also made great use of an existing TikTok trend – dancing – which is an easy and highly-engaging activity for the TikTok community to get involved with. Of course, keepy-ups provided alternative creative inspiration for the community to show off their moves, especially for die-hard football fans who love Goleador.
The Results
The campaign hit the spot, generating 56M+ views from 65K+ entries – and a whopping 12.39% engagement rate. This shows the TikTok community connected with the idea of this campaign, which was to launch a sweet made to galvanise a nation that had been through so much pain at the start of 2020. In fact, over 65,000 new users went on to follow Goleador’s brand profile, largely driven by using influential Creators in the One Day Max In-Feed Ads. A brand lift study revealed the Branded Hashtag Challenge resulted in a 15.1% increase in brand awareness and 310% lift in ad recall, proving mission accomplished.
It’s also worth noting that the campaign drove these results all within a three-day period. This is half the normal duration of a Branded Hashtag Challenge and goes to show that a great creative concept can go a long way.
