AXE

AXE on TikTok: Doubling impact across brand metrics and offline sales

AXE is a key brand in the Unilever personal care portfolio offering a variety of deodorants, body wash, and other hygiene and styling products for men. Focusing on inclusivity, mutuality, and progress, the brand has continued to elevate its image in tune with evolving notions around masculinity.

Goal

The focus for this campaign was to increase brand awareness and market penetration within the target group for AXE shower gel and deodorant. The brand was keen on understanding the impact of different campaign objectives on brand metrics and offline sales driven by TikTok ads.

Strategy

The setup centered on a Multi-Cell Brand Lift Study and a Multi-Cell Offline Sales Lift Study with measurement partner Circana. This combination allowed AXE to experiment with 2 different campaign objectives – reach vs. video views – and to measure the incremental impact of its creatives across the funnel.

In order to determine their effect consistently, each cell aired exactly the same assets, a blend of creator-led content and brand creatives.

Results

The campaign objectives proved relevant for driving results, both in terms of brand KPIs as well as for offline sales. Each campaign objective served a unique purpose within the media mix: while the reach objective was instrumental in driving mass awareness, video views fostered deeper engagement and audience interaction.

The assets with video views as an objective generated results equating to 2x the German benchmark increase for ad recall as well as 1.2x the German benchmark increase for awareness.

Creatives focused on increasing reach, were at par with the German benchmark for ad recall and achieved 1.8x higher results in the awareness category.

For offline sales, assets targeting video views yielded a 2x higher ROAS and sales impact compared to those aiming to do drive reach.