TanvasTouch® Roars at Cannes Lions 2018 with a Silver Lion for MediaCom’s Gillette BabyFace Campaign
At the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, MediaCom Israel’s BabyFace campaign received a Silver Lion award for Excellence in Media Insights & Strategy, in partnership with Gillette and powered by TanvasTouch®. We are thrilled to have contributed to this campaign, and particularly honored to receive a Media Lion. This is the most coveted award in the creative and marketing communications industry, celebrating the implementation of inspiring and innovative ideas.
Background
The goal of the Gillette BabyFace campaign was to persuade expecting fathers to shave their beards in the interest of growing closer to their newborn children. According to research at Harvard University and The Boston Children’s Hospital, skin-on-skin touch communication helps babies to develop and bond with their parents. Therefore, the campaign sought to inspire new fathers to shave their beards, offering their newborn children this essential skin-to-skin contact.
One of the ways that MediaCom hoped to make this campaign all the more convincing was by making it experiential. In order to persuade these dads and dads-to-be, MediaCom wanted to show them first-hand what stubble actually felt like to babies, and the perfect solution to this was TanvasTouch. Our first-of-its-kind haptics technology allowed users to run their finger over a touchscreen to feel — as a baby would — the stubble of a beard compared to that of a smooth face. TanvasTouch technology makes feeling simulated textures (such as beard stubble or shaving cream) possible through precisely controlling friction.
This application was promoted at maternity wards, birth classes, and baby fairs in order to share this touch experience with new parents and parents-to-be. The MediaCom app allowed users to interact by feeling the stubble, applying and feeling shaving cream, and shaving the beard. Most importantly, it gave these men an authentic sense of what newborn babies feel when touching their fathers. Through this campaign, the power of TanvasTouch exposed dads to the emotional lives of newborns, convincing many of them to shave.
Results
The use of TanvasTouch technology in this campaign was a media-first in advertising, and it proved to be effective. The media immediately picked up on Medicom’s creative application of our technology. Discussions around the research and insights it is based on earned media value in excess of $200,000. Post-campaign research found a 15% boost in consideration to shave amongst bearded dads. Additionally, despite the fact that bearded new dads are just a fraction of Gillette’s user base, and that Gillette was already dominating nearly 80% of the market, there was still a 9% increase in sales thanks to the BabyFace campaign. To view additional details about this campaign, visit the Cannes Lion 2018 Winners, Shortlist and Talks website (login required) or on the MediaCom website.
We congratulate MediaCom on their Silver Lion for the BabyFace campaign and take pride in having enabled them to display the sense of touch, which was so critical to their success. This campaign has also won two Festival of Media Global Awards including Gold for Creative Use of Media and Silver for Best Use of Technology. To read more about this award-winning campaign, check out the case study on MediaCom’s website. Do you have the next Silver Lion idea powered by TanvasTouch? Visit us at https://tanvas.co/agencies/.
