Keeping a Stuffy Up to Snuff in an Award-Winning Way

Whether it’s a stuffy, a lovey, a best friend or a teddy, a child’s stuffed animal does it all. They’re the best friend, the confidante, the secret keeper and the one that is typically velcroed to wherever your child goes, for better or worse. That level of love can lead to the pileup of a whole lot of germs and dirt, which is how some of the great minds at Access — along with the Lysol IAT team — came up with the Lysol Teddy Repair project. The team found a way to take away a child’s most beloved possession (with a parent’s consent) and ensure that it was in good hands while it received a luxurious “spa treatment” at Lysol. The creativity and success of the multi-pronged project landed the Access Lysol team several awards and industry accolades, which made us want to know: Was this method for success something that could be replicated? Matt Schwartz, the project team lead and a Vice President in our New York office, shared the top 3 methods that helped this campaign gain extensive notoriety.

1 – Produce compelling content 

Messing with a child’s stuffed animal can be risky, emotional business. Ask any parent who has previously had to wash one what their method is going into cleaning their child’s most adored friend while also keeping them as calm as possible. It’s no easy feat! Convincing caretakers that a Lysol product was worth this potential trauma meant tapping into their heartstrings. To do that, Access worked with McCann, a creative advertisement agency, and went to three different elementary schools and three different preschools in New Jersey where they picked up stuffed animals in the “Lysol Teddy Repair Truck” with the promise of bringing them back next week better than ever. The animals were then mailed directly to the child’s home and with camera rolling, the incredibly sweet reunions were captured. Those precious moments were then edited together to create a hero video that Access used for earned media outreach. Check out the video for yourself and see how watching a reunion that is so pure and so genuine will make you smile. It also encouraged hundreds of families outside of New Jersey to send Lysol a stuffed animal to become as good as new.

2 – Go beyond the functional benefit of a product

In the grander scheme of this project, Access was trying to do more than run an impactful campaign about a cleaning product that had previously been on the market; it was about making kids’ and parents’ lives better and healthier. Matt Schwartz and team wanted to give families a peace of mind and a sense of comfort knowing their child wasn’t sleeping next to something that could potentially make them sick. The team partnered with Dr. Andrew Summerfield of BioCote Limited, a leading antibacterial technology company, to understand and measure the number and type of microorganisms that can contaminate everyday items. The results were startling: 66.67% of teddy bear samples were contaminated with harmful bacteria that may cause illness. Attention-grabbing statistics combined with an emotional video up-leveled the concept of disinfection to encompass something that was so much more than the use of a product to disinfect, but to truly care for your family in a deeper way, Matt said.

3 – Create multiple touch points 

Like all our campaigns, the goal was to reach as many people as possible. While the sweepstakes got families from across the country involved, the team didn’t want to rely solely on a sweepstakes to define their success. So in addition to the video, Access also teamed up with a team of influencers – led by a DIY expert influencer – who quickly and thoroughly walked parents through a few simple ways in which they could implement Lysol’s Teddy Repair method in their own home on their own time. Across all program influencers, there were 76 pieces of content resulting in 13MM impressions. By providing various touch points for consumers to interact with, people everywhere were given the chance to absorb the content and engage with the message of the campaign in different ways that best suit their lifestyle and preference.

Some key results of note for the Teddy Repair campaign include 251MM earned impressions, 100% key message pull-through and positive story tone and 24 earned placements. But beyond hard numbers, the team was equally as proud to live up to one of Access’s core values of being a “What-Elser” — never settling for the status quo, pushing boundaries and asking “what else” can be done to lift our work product above and beyond expectations. It’s the What-Elser mindset that leads to award-winning work!

By: Matt Schwartz