MANILA: Campaigns & Grey has beaten two finalists to win Procter &
Gamble's 'Best sustained brand-building' award for its work in turning
around Ultra Joy in the Philippines.
In all, about 400 entries were submitted for the seven prizes presented
by P&G at its bi-annual awards ceremony in Cincinnati. P&G judges
credited the agency for having "effective and highly-appealing plans"
based on profitable share, income and growth as well as strides in
achieving brand equity against competing brands over a minimum two-year
period.
Ultra Joy's rise to market leadership has been extraordinary given that
P&G had considered dropping the brand after failing to make inroads in
the Philippines two years after the product's 1994 launch. Campaigns
management supervisor Meldy Warren said the agency devised a series of
high-profile challenges to illustrate Ultra Joy's superior promise
benefits against established rivals such Colgate Palmolive's Axion and
Ajax brands.
The challenges were incorporated into a programme which encompassed
television commercials,nationwide television coverage by the country's
biggest TV station and consumer participation.
The first initiative - the low-budget 'Doorstep challenge' - took Ultra
Joy into local homes, getting housewives to test the brand against their
existing detergent. The aim was to prove the product's value and
strength, showing that only a small amount of Ultra Joy was enough to
clean stubborn grease stains from a variety of surfaces. The filmed
visits were subsequently turned into commercials, which benefited from
the "genuine and unscripted" responses, said Warren.
Subsequent challenges were bigger and more ambitious in scale. The
agency arranged to stack cleaned dishes along the length of the
country's longest bridge as part of a challenge for the Guinness Book of
Records and to wash dishes for a day for the Philippines' biggest
shipping company and a hotel.
Beyond TV spots, the challenges incorporated competitions for consumers
to guess the number of plates washed and a local TV station was roped in
to provide regular updates.
"We always tried to keep all the activities integrated and we ensured it
was interactive with consumer participation," Warren said.
