To leverage the start of the new season, US detergent giant Tide teamed with football legend Peyton Manning, singing star Gwen Stefani and broadcaster NBC in a mashup of Tide commercials and network show promos with a campaign called ‘When Is Laundry Night?’
The campaign, developed with P&G multi agency Woven (which includes Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, Grey, Powell Communications and Taylor), is built on the idea that, according to the official NFL sponsor and Tide parent Procter & Gamble (P&G), Sunday night is the busiest laundry night for Americans.
So, to avoid the clash with NBC’s NFL Sunday Night Football, Tide sets out to try and convince people to change their ways.
The campaign, which runs across TV, digital and social and is linked by the #LaundryNight hashtag, broke on 8 September during the first Sunday Night Football broadcast of the year.
The campaign began with a Tide commercial which ran early on during NBC’s Sunday Night Football in which iconic quarterback and Tide endorser Peyton Manning proclaims that laundry night is being moved to Tuesday – so fans can devote their Sundays to the National Football League.
“Sundays are now 100 percent NFL – Not For Laundry.”
But the brand then followed that up with a spot in which singer Gwen Stefani, a judge on NBC show ‘The Voice’ complains about Manning infringing on her own show’s Tuesday night time spot.
This led to a Manning fronting a 30-second apology spot,
which in turn was followed by another faux promo in which the cast of NBC’s ‘Superstore’ also complains about the NFL possibly shifting laundry night to Thursday and in which they urge shoppers at their faux Walmart to stock up on Tide for Sunday night washing.
Again, this was followed by yet another spot to be used as a promo for future NBC Sunday Night broadcasts in which Baltimore Ravens running back Mark Ingram plays a crazed herald, tapping on a man’s window from outside to repeatedly warn him
‘Sunday is coming’, so he can get laundry done in advance.
Viewers can sees the whole multi-commercial sequence here:
According to Andrea Diquez, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, New York, and of Woven, the campaign emerged from a simple insight – that the NFL could also mean ‘Not For Laundry’.
“The idea is whatever night is laundry night, it’s got to be Tide,” Diquez said.
“We want to put Tide into people’s homes every night of the week and be part of American culture.”
“Sunday night, besides being when NBC broadcasts NFL games, is actually the busiest laundry night in the US,” says Amy Krehbiel, associate brand director for North American laundry at P&G.
“NBC was happy to get involved and make talent available for the creative as “an opportunity for fans to see our top NBC stars paired with NFL athletes like never before,” added Mark Marshall, president of advertising sales and partnerships for NBCUniversal.
Comment:
It’s all quite meta and (in our opinion), very smart.
If this campaign is a success, then we’d expect it to end in an epic Super Bowl commercial.
One that follows in the successful footsteps of the brand’s previous Super Bowl blockbuster commercial (see case study)
and 2018’s ‘Thursday Night Tide’ campaign (see case study).
Indeed, this year’s work takes an approach we have seen before when Tide took a similar approach to incorporating on-air talent from Fox into ads for the Super Bowl and in-season broadcasts in 2018.
It was back in 2009 that Procter & Gamble became an official sponsor of the NFL in what was its biggest-ever sponsorship deal spanning grooming fabric/air care and household goods categories and which saw some P&G brands able to carry the logo and others become ‘official products’ of NFL locker rooms.
The deal was extended for a further five years in 2018 and P&G is able to promote its brands across NFL.com and on US TV through the NFL Network and advertise its association around the Super Bowl in a deal that spans a cart full of P&G products such as Febreze, Secret, Vicks, Head & Shoulders, Gillette, Secret, Old Spice and Tide.
Links:
P&G / Tide
https://www.youtube.com/user/tidelaundry
Woven
NFL
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