Studies have shown that air pollution is not just a health issue, it may be affecting children’s ability to learn too. Through the support of the Philips Foundation and Global Action Plan, Philips have created the Clean Air for Schools Framework consolidating and building on the wide range of air pollution resources available to schools. Allowing teachers to have the knowledge and guidance to help work with parents on this important topic.
The Story Lab identified this as a fantastic brand story for Philips around an important issue that was gaining more traction in line with national and global conversations around air pollution. However, insights showed that people can feel disconnected to air pollution when thought of on a global scale. But when you talk about the real effects it has on our children every day at school, it becomes much more real. Therefore the brief set out to achieve the following objectives:
- Engage audiences with our content to allow us to educate around breathing clean air and the positive health benefits this can bring.
- Drive sales of the Philips Air Purification product.
- Deliver on the Philips people first strategy of ‘Improving lives through meaningful innovation.’
We knew that through the work Philips had done with the Clean Air for Schools programme (and specifically the work they’d done with Russell Scott Primary School) that we could create a compelling campaign to educate people about the effects of air pollution in and around schools and put Philips Air Purifiers at the heart of the conversation in a truly authentic way. Philips Air Purifiers had been placed in Russell Scott Primary School amongst others for over a year and been shown to have had proven tangible effects on air quality when data was collected and analysed by the University of Manchester as part of a study commissioned by Global Action Plan and the Clean Air For Schools programme.
Putting the pupils of Russell Scott Primary School front and centre of the campaign was a key part of our strategy. The broad target audience was families with children, we knew there is nothing more powerful than children (affected by the problem adults have created) delivering the message. But this needed to be more than a product message to drive sales and behaviour change. It needed an educational element and when it comes to pollution, facts about the effects on our planet and in this case our children are a very powerful lever to pull. This led to the creative proposition of ‘Did You Know’, facts about air pollution and its effects on children delivered entirely by teachers and pupils.
Philips had the story, and had the right people to tell the story, but needed the right context to deliver it. Sky was adding the Air Quality Report into their Sky News programming, which was the perfect opportunity to align with a media property that spoke to the audience we were after in the most contextually relevant place possible. So, we created a suite of sponsorship idents featuring pupils from Russell Scott Primary School delivering short punchy facts about air pollution to feature on the Sky News linear channel and Weather section of the Sky News digital platform.
Further to this, we created an interactive native article with a documentary style video embedded. Filled with sleek infographics, emotive imagery of school children and easily digestible, succinct text, we were able to tell their story in yet another innovative format furthering the brand cut-though. It didn’t stop there.
Using Sky AdVance retargeting capabilities, we were able to retarget those exposed to our idents with short-form educational videos. We also utilised Sky’s premium video space to broadcast out our message alongside factual, and highly popular Short form VoD content (i.e. Sports and News), which allowed us to benefit from Sky News’ credibility as a trustworthy and award-winning news service.
And last, but not least, we replicated the infographic style of the article and developed a sleek native unit, amplified via a programmatic buy, to deliver scale whilst ensuring continuity of asset and brand story.
Swoon and Sky Media
