Company: Kindred Campaign: Kindred/British Cheese Board - National Anthem for Cheddar Category: Low Budget Campaign of the Year - South - WINNER Partners: British Cheese Board Objectives We’ve been working with the British Cheese Board, the promotional and educational body for cheese, for three years. In May, we were tasked to come up with an idea to get people talking about Cheddar: a popular cheese, but one that is often taken for granted. In particular, the objectives were to: • Give Britain’s outstanding Cheddar the profile it deserves • Raise awareness of the fact that Cheddar was invented in Britain • Reach a broad target audience, particularly younger people • Raise awareness of the British Cheese Board as the promotional body for cheese The activity budget was small: £13,000 to include all fee and costs. Target Audience   We used our Twitter and Facebook communities as a cost-effective route to gathering insight about our target audiences and to understand what would work. This proved a particularly effective way of developing an approach that would resonate with the younger audience we sought to reach, as 56 per cent of our Facebook community fall into the under 34 year old age group. Through building relationships with British Cheese Board Twitter followers and Facebook fans, we were able to better understand our audience’s sense of humour and come up with a stunt that would engage them. In a year where patriotic sentiment was riding high, Kindred’s strategy positioned Cheddar as a source of national pride; taking a fun and quirky approach that would capture imaginations across the board. People like cheese and our strategy maximised on this affection. Our approach was to bring together two British traditions: the national anthem and Cheddar cheese, evoking pride, while making people laugh. In doing this, we were able to reach a mass audience, including young people who cannot be easily reached through traditional consumer and national publications. Action To celebrate the fact that the UK makes the best Cheddar in the world, we launched a nationwide competition to find an anthem for this tasty national treasure. We called on choirs, singing groups, budding song writers and Cheddar enthusiasts to pen their very own ode to the nation’s favourite cheese, with original lyrics set to the patriotic tunes of either God Save the Queen, Land of Hope and Glory or Jerusalem. Alongside this call to the British public, we worked with a choir to create a film of our own Anthem for Cheddar, which you can see here. We also secured the backing of celebrity cheese-maker Alex James who provided a quote for our press release. We implemented an exhaustive media relations and social media sell-in, across more than 500 national, regional and consumer media outlets. The focus was online media because of the resonance this channel has with a younger audience. The entries poured in and were narrowed down to a shortlist of five, which you can see here. Following the short listing process, we invited the British public to log onto the British Cheese Board website to crown an overall winner. Results Within a week of launch we were on BBC Online, BBC Six Music, Radio 2, Radio Five Live, The Huffington Post, Sun.co.uk and 30 regional radio stations. Quickly the stunt took on a life of its own. By the end of launch week we were the centre of a three-minute conversation on Have I Got News for You, while one regional media title launched its own campaign to see its local choir shortlisted to win. A number of prominent radio shows started ongoing features around the concept, with Shaun Keaveny of the BBC 6 Music breakfast show submitting his own entry to the competition. News of our search for a Cheddar anthem soon went international, with a blog post appearing on the BBC World Service Facebook Page and a journalist from the Wall Street Journal requesting a sneak preview into the judging day. The launch phase alone generated 116 pieces of media coverage, with a circulation of 220m. The shortlisting and winners announcement generated further national, regional and consumer coverage and, in total, 147 pieces were secured. These included: • 18 national pieces • 9 international pieces • 6 Facebook pages and blogs • 9 consumer pieces • 85 regional pieces • 20 trade pieces In addition to an impressive amount of media coverage, other metrics showed the stunt had clear resonance with our target audience: • Hits to the British Cheese Board website on launch day were more than twice the daily average. • 83 eligible entries were submitted – many of which referenced the fact the Cheddar was invented in Britain. • Collectively, the launch video and eligible entries have received 29,000 views on YouTube (so far) through PR alone (no seed funding was spent). • 2,386 people voted for their favourite entry. • Since we started working with the British Cheese Board, public queries to our enquiries line have doubled as the BCB’s profile has been increased. On a very small budget, we got people talking (and singing) about Cheddar. Whether they penned their own song, laughed at other people’s efforts or voted for their favourite anthem; thousands of people – including the hard to reach younger audience – were challenged to really appreciate British Cheddar and to see it, not just as an everyday basic in the family fridge, but as a British institution which was invented here. Through our search for a National Anthem for Cheddar we have reignited the UK’s love for this overlooked national treasure and built the profile of the British Cheese Board as the go-to organisation for cheese information. As the Workshop Marketing blog said: “There’s nothing like a clever idea to generate some news coverage, and the BCB has come up with a belter… Brilliant PR”. URLs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnO4wvJEd0s http://britishcheese.com/competition The PRmoment Golden Hedgehog Awards 2014 are now open for entries. Here are this years updated categories.