L'Oréal Paris x Arsenal Football Club
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...
How'd we end up here? Let me take you on a journey...
The #1 priority for L’Oreal Paris in the UK is to win market share by recruiting new consumers - many of whom are men - into the brand. But to win with a largely disengaged audience, L’Oréal Paris knew they needed more than just an ad campaign. So we embarked on a multi-year culture-first partnership with Arsenal Football Club, one of the UK’s leading football teams.
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.
Snapshot of a partial campaign ecosystem showing the flex of the partnership from content to stadium media and beyond.
Our partnership is grounded in branded content made with Arsenal superfans in mind. Each video is 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.
In another fan favorite, we had the players go head to head in a spot kick shoot out that tested their aim as well as gave them a chance to sample the full range of deo scents. All content was shot in tight 45 min windows at AFC's training grounds, which put our own crew to the test - at some points building entire indoor studios on pitches overnight.
We've also welcomed Declan Rice into the L'Oréal Paris family, launching with a stylish photoshoot and OOH campaign shot by photographer Ryan Saradjola.
Selects from our launch shoot
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.
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. Our social content alone received 5.9M views and 122M impressions in less than a week with overwhelmingly positive sentiment.
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.
The best thing about this partnership? It's only the beginning. Watch this space for even more to come.