About Philips

Philips is a diversified health and well-being company focused on improving people’s lives through meaningful innovation in the areas of Health care, Consumer Lifestyle, and Lighting.

About Ogilvy & Mather

Ogilvy & Mather is one of the largest marketing communications companies in the world. Ogilvy & Mather services Fortune Global 500 companies as well as local businesses through its network of more than 500 offices in 126 countries.

The goal

When Philips launched the new Click and Style, a three-in-one electric grooming tool, its objectives were clear: Philips wanted to bring young men into the electric franchise and, by doing so, accelerate its electric male grooming markets. Philips wanted to communicate the product proposition “One click, endless possibilities” and engage young men based on this idea. It also wanted to sell 42,000 units within the first six months just in France, Netherlands and Germany.

The challenge

In 2013, Philips realized it had a problem: hipsters. The trendsetting demographic was telling men that being clean-shaven was no longer cool. Philips needed to break down conventions within the grooming category around unrealistic perfection. These messages were not only slowing down the growth of Philips’ established male grooming markets, they were also preventing younger consumers from even considering electric shaving and grooming. To reverse this decline, Philips launched the Click and Style. Now, the challenge was reaching this young, tech-savvy audience on mobile devices.

The solution

Under the motto “One click, endless possibilities,” Philips created “Designed to Play,” the world’s first fully mobile-enabled interactive video experience where viewers guided the video’s hero through a seemingly endless number of possibilities. The viewer helps our hero decide how to style his facial hair for a night of partying, and then helps him remember what happened the night before.

In the first year of Philips’ campaign, users were able to create up to 625 differents stories. The starting point for these stories was five different shaving styles. In the second year, Phillips added a sixth style, allowing for 1,296 possible story combinations. By switching between six characters, users see a number of versions of what happened the night before.

“We wanted to liberate this group from cultural tension and bring playfulness into young men’s grooming habits,” Thorsten Ruehlemann, worldwide managing partner, Ogilvy & Mather Advertising Düsseldorf, told Adweek. We wanted to show you can easily change your style, your image, and your look.”

The results

Through interactive digital storytelling, young men were introduced to a new, multifunctional electric grooming product in a way that captures their attention and imagination. Philips was blown away by the results. The interactive video experience engaged the target audience approximately three times longer than is typical for a high-quality video of equal length.

In just the first year, the project received millions of views—more than doubling what was originally planned—which represented an earned media growth of 153 percent. And in just the first six months of the campaign, Philips was able to accelerate the growth in the electric male grooming markets compared with markets that didn’t run the campaign. In the same six months, sales were 16 percent better than planned.