socialmedia
E-COMMERCE AND CAUSE MARKETING
The Art of the Celebrity Endorsement Speedo enlists Olympic athletes and artists in a charitable social media campaign BY CHRISTINE BIRKNER | SENIOR STAFF WRITER
cbirkner@ama.org
S
ports equipment brands rely on the exposure that they get from professional athletes using their products in competition. Brands like Nike or Louisville Slugger get that kind of organic endorsement regularly on a national or international stage, but for brands playing in other arenas, such exposure occurs less frequently. To develop year-round awareness and draw traffic to
14
its newly re-designed e-commerce site, Speedo USA, a division of New York-based PVH Corp., had to make some waves. “Most of the time, we only hear about athletes’ lives when they’re in the pool competing. We were looking for new ways to tell their stories,” says Alyssa Igawa, marketing director at Speedo USA. “They all have charities that they’re pretty involved with, and we wanted to
push awareness to our dot-com, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone and test what the social space would allow us to do—if we could convert, and what it would look like on our end if we could engage new users.” In December 2013, Speedo launched “Art of the Cap,” a social media campaign featuring five Olympic swimmers and five artists. Olympic gold medalists Ryan Lochte, Natalie Coughlin, Nathan Adrian, Dana Vollmer and Cullen Jones, all of whom are on Speedo’s endorsement roster, paired with artists Dave Kinsey, Adhemas Batista, Gianmarco Magnani, Jessica Hische and Jolby & Friends, respectively, to design swim caps that were sold on SpeedoUSA.com to benefit charities chosen by the athletes. A microsite on SpeedoUSA.com and Speedo’s YouTube channel include videos of the athletes talking about their chosen charities and explaining the design inspirations for their caps. The videos and photos of the caps also were posted on Speedo’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest pages, and social media users were encouraged to tweet or post photos of themselves wearing one of the specially designed Speedo caps using the hashtag #ArtoftheCap. To raise awareness for the effort, Speedo sent media kits to bloggers in the swimming community, and the artists, athletes and charities also promoted it through their own social media channels. The brand eschewed traditional media buys in favor of social media to leverage social’s viral nature and potential staying power, according to Igawa. “You could buy a commercial, and it’ll run three times and it never lives again. We wanted this campaign to have longer legs,” she says. “We wanted to engage everybody in a conversation, and we wanted to tell more stories with our athletes. With social, we could do that much easier. We didn’t have to pay for media like we would have if we were buying print or TV, and consumers wouldn’t have latched on to it as easily. We used all of our earned and owned social channels, and all of our blogger friends, to have people tell stories on our behalf and get that buzz out there.”
MARKETING NEWS | MAY 2014
MN May 2014 1-64_4.22 copy-4-24-14.indd 14
4/25/14 11:17 AM
socialmedia
IMAGES COURTESY OF SPEEDO USA.
E-COMMERCE AND CAUSE MARKETING
Speedo's website and Youtube channel include videos of the athletes talking about their chosen charities and the design inspiration for their caps.
A story about Adrian’s cap appeared in his hometown newspaper, the Kitsap Sun, because the cap had a nautical theme as a nod to his hometown of Bremerton, Wash., which is located near a Naval base. “Nathan’s charity, Kids Beating Cancer, posted a picture of the cap on social media, too, and the buzz kept going,” Igawa says. “Then one of the kids who beat cancer got Nathan’s cap and he posted a picture of it on Instagram and tagged Nathan, and Nathan retweeted it. It’s the best thing to naturally have something like that come out of it. The athletes felt proud to not only do something for their causes, but to take part in the design and tell a personal story to make it all that much more memorable.” Speedo sold out of the caps in five days, with 100% of the proceeds going to charity. “The first lesson we learned was that we didn’t make enough caps,” Igawa laughs. “We sold out of Natalie’s in the first 24 hours. People bought them for different reasons. They liked Natalie. They liked the charity. They liked the look of the cap. They liked the artist. We were right in our assumption that if we told good stories, people would be interested.” During the first week of the campaign, Speedo increased its Instagram followers by 127% and the campaign generated 20 million total social media impressions, according to Igawa. “We gained more
Instagram users during the week of this campaign than we did in the entire year,” she says. Speedo fans posted photos of their new caps on Instagram and Twitter with captions such as, “My dad got me this cap for Christmas and I can’t wait to wear it! #ArtoftheCap,” and, “Swim practice will be so much sweeter with more heart @SpeedoUSA @danavollmer @jessicahische #ArtoftheCap.” The campaign also boosted Speedo’s mobile traffic and led to more sales on its e-commerce site, Igawa says. “More than 12% of the caps were sold via mobile, which is a pretty big number for us. It was the second-best-selling product on mobile for 2013. That told us that we are converting on mobile from social so that we could continue to push more sales through mobile. Sometimes, when people came to buy the cap, they grabbed some goggles while they were there. We’re engaging new consumers and having some conversation on our website so they’ll hopefully come back to us in the future.” Art of the Cap was one of Speedo’s first social media campaigns, she says. “We communicate on social with the athletes, congratulating them on swims and birthdays, and promote products along the way, but this was the first campaign that we did that had this scale. This allowed us to see what we would be capable of in social.”
Based on the favorable results, the social effort can be deemed a success, Igawa says. “We really have a very large swim community and they tend to be pretty young, and we wanted to grow that. We wanted to see if we could get those numbers up. We were extremely successful, especially with Instagram. The campaign also helped us target not just swimmers, but people who are looking for that coveted item to represent an athlete or an artist, or a charity. Over the last month, I’ve gotten e-mails from the charities saying that their fan base has grown as a result of Art of the Cap.” Margaret Guedes, CEO and founder of Orlando, Fla.-based Kids Beating Cancer, says that the campaign’s cause marketing element had a real impact on her organization. “Kids Beating Cancer [is] very grateful to Nathan Adrian for selecting our charity for the campaign. Through Nathan’s cap, kids were allowed to receive the treatment that is their best and only hope for a cure,” she said in an e-mail. The campaign helped foster support for those charities while also forging Speedo’s image as a charitably minded company, Igawa says. “We were able to show how much we care about the athletes on our roster and support them with their causes, that we’re not just there to sell swimsuits.” m
MAY 2014 | MARKETING NEWS
MN May 2014 1-64_4.22 copy-4-24-14.indd 15
15
4/25/14 11:17 AM