OgilvyAction Helps Axe Embellish People’s Relationship Status

In order to bring the Axe Effect to life for young Tunisian men, OgilvyAction, the brand activation arm of The Ogilvy Group, needed to create a clever campaign despite the country’s advertising restrictions. Given Tunisa’s massive uplift of Facebook accounts in the past six months, the social network provided the ideal platform to digitally activate the Axe Effect via a unique app.

Using Facebook’s famous Relationship Status profile feature, the Axe Effect application enabled the target audience to brag about their multiple relationships.  By simply using the app a special Relationship Status would appear on the wall of the young man, making it appear as if he had tens of hundreds of girlfriends, generating a lot of attention and interest amongst his friends.  Those who clicked on this outrageous status update were taken to the Axe page where they could use the application as well.

The application spread to thousands of people via newsfeeds, profile pages, comments and likes.  It has also created a huge global buzz with coverage from Japan to the USA, including over 3,000 blog mentions from California alone.  The app also currently has 500,000 fans on Facebook and over 2,310,000 followers on Twitter.  

The power of Facebook allowed us to bypass the advertising restrictions in Tunisia, and successfully spread the Axe Effect by simply tweaking one of its functions. After only six weeks the application is becoming one of the most used digital activation tools for Unilever in recent years.

Contact: Lauren Smith
+1 212 484 0314