Let me set the scene…
It's the 20th of May, the day after Arsenal Football Club's Premier League win - their first time winning the title in 22 years. You go online to check out the pandemonium of last night's celebrations, and you're hit with videos like this on your feed.
How’d we end up here? Let’s rewind a little.
L’Oréal Paris x Arsenal Football Club
Reaching UK men on and off the pitch
L’Oreal Paris wanted to recruit new consumers - many of whom are men - into the brand. But to win with a disengaged audience, L’Oréal Paris knew they needed more than just an ad campaign - leading to a multi-year partnership with Arsenal Football Club.
From branded entertainment living on Arsenal’s own channels to in-game presence on pitch to product launches featuring Arsenal’s own Declan Rice, we’ve changed the game for L’Oréal Paris across both the Men Expert and Elvive Hair Care franchises.
Our partnership is grounded in branded content designed not only to genuinely but also to put L'Oréal Paris products to the test - like this very real lie detector test we gave Declan Rice, Eberechi Eze, and Ethan Nwaneri, with a little help from Roman Kemp.
All content was shot in tight 45 min windows at AFC's training grounds, putting our own crew to the test - at some points building entire indoor studios on pitches overnight.
As part of this partnership, we also welcomed Declan Rice into the L'Oréal Paris family, launching with a stylish photoshoot and OOH campaign shot by photographer Ryan Saradjola.
Declan Does Deos
We followed this up with a high impact 360 campaign relaunching L'Oréal Men Expert deodorants. A launch spot dramatized how Declan protects his focus with when the pressure is on with Carbon Protect, followed up by a companion campaign that turned up the heat for the Thermic Resist range.
Glow up x 2
The first phase of the campaign has been a resounding success, with Men Expert Deos growing at 4x the market average and Elvive Hair Care growing at 2.5x the speed of the category.
More importantly for L'Oréal Paris, we've managed to get the brand into cultural conversations you wouldn't expect. We've not only sparked a national conversation about a certain someone's glow up; we even popped up organically at the victory celebrations for Arsenal's historic Premier League win, which is a brand glow up of sorts, too.
