The Background
Haleon is one of the world’s leading healthcare companies who employ over 1,700 people across four locations in Ireland. The global home of Panadol is situated in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford where approximately 6.5 billion Panadol tablets are produced each year. Panadol have embedded themselves in the heart of the Irish community and have employed generations of families over the years.
Sponsorship is an inherently emotive tool, which allows Panadol to exist beyond a functional message. Creating a partnership with RTÉ aligned Panadol with original Irish content to continue to reinforce its ‘Made in Ireland’ message by anchoring the brand with an Irish content provider, and Irish oriented content.
This campaign won the Best Use of TV Sponsorship category at the 2023 TAMI Awards
The Challenge
Panadol had a distinct business and marketing challenge. Panadol ha been the leading pain product in Ireland for a number of years, the mission was to retain the existing link between Panadol and Ireland, and to remain category leader in the analgesic pain market and give consumers a reason to choose the Panadol brand over others during times of purchase.
To achieve this, Core Sponsorship focused on three specific objectives.
• To increase brand awareness that Panadol is ‘Made in Ireland’.
• Expand sales in Grocery in IRE.
• Drive relevance with a younger audience of Ads 25-44.
Panadol has had a successful partnership with RTÉ over a number of years, they had previously sponsored a range of different activity on RTE including Nationwide and their ‘Homegrown Heroes Campaign’, where they identified and recognised community heroes across Ireland who make a difference every day.
The Strategy
In 2022 Core Sponsorship wanted to keep the content fresh and relevant to consumers. The ambition was to change the approach slightly whilst making sure they were complementing the overall brand strategy and ambitions.
Using Irish broadcaster RTÉ and their high-reaching media platforms, they created a campaign that resonated with consumers on an emotive level. The partnership with RTÉ leveraged RTÉ’s place as Ireland’s most trusted media source and allowed Core Sponsorship to access RTÉ creative and production capabilities to create stings and content. The centrepiece was a sponsorship of RTÉ’s Irish documentaries and programmes showcasing inspiring Irish stories. This was further strengthened by a sponsorship of premium Irish shows on the RTE Player, sponsorship of the Paddy’s Day
Parade, a HPTO on the RTÉ website on Paddy’s Day, and sponsorship of Playback on RTÉ 1. This multi-pronged approach created a range of touch points to the campaign for consumers.
Research carried out by Core Research was essential when it came to strategically planning the sponsorship for 2022 and showed where the team needed to focus our efforts in order to gain important purchase consideration at the counter.
During research in late 2021, Core Research reported that some of the messaging had performed weakly on distinctiveness and memorability – indicating a lack of brand association between these messages. This was then a focus the team brought into
the 2022 sponsorship campaign-they wanted the campaign to have meaning and so focused on Irish documentaries and inspiring Irish stories, giving the campaign the capacity to enter the mental workspace and elicit an emotional response with viewers.
The research also showed us that we needed to be personally relevant to our audience so the team incorporated the player sponsorship thereby reaching the younger audience audience with content within a space that was relevant to them.
The Plan
Core Sponsorship made the most of what TV had to offer Panadol by cherry picking the most suitable programmes throughout the year whilst making sure they were aligned with the brand message and campaign objectives.
TV is the hero channel for Panadol and leads the flighting and alignment across other mediums.
RTE was strategically chosen as the partner for it’s Irish content but also it’s reach. RTÉ One continues to be watched by more people than any other station, with over 8 in 10 claiming to ever watch it. The RTÉ Player (70% total ever watched)
continues to provide significantly more value than all VOD other players in the Irish market. (Core Research, January 2023.)
The programmes chosen included:
The Way We Were
Fungie’s Kingdom
The Summer Show Build Your Own Home
Tommy Tiernans Epic West
Great Lighthouses
The extension of the sponsorship to the RTE Player helped to tap into a younger audience of Ads 25-44 who are more likely to consume their media on playback devices such as players. The sponsorship of premium content on the player consisted of 326 player episodes across the year across 82 different series’ which included the likes of ‘Ireland in Music, The Style Counsellors, The 2 Johnnies Do America and Rebellion’, among others.
The Results
Through work from Core Research the team can identify how the campaign has impacted positively on the objectives that were set out at the beginning our the campaign.
- Awareness of the brand message reached the highest level to date. The ‘Irishness’ score in December 2021 was 76% and is now 80%. (Core Research, Jan 2023)
- Panadol leads all brands when it comes to perceptions of being made in Ireland and has been recently announced as the No.1 painkiller in Ireland again, retaining it’s title.
- Panadol has evolved from being a product made in Ireland to a brand
chosen by Irish consumers. It has gained those important inches in competitive advantage, giving consumers a reason to choose Panadol over others
- Panadol Extra – category share increased
- Those who recall the campaign (86% vs 62%) are also significantly more likely to consider purchasing than those who are not aware, also indicating campaign mobilisation
- The total purchase consideration figure was increased by 4 percentage points
“RTÉ have been instrumental to authentically communicating Panadol’s Made in Ireland campaign. RTE continues to impress with their creative response by intertwining the commemoration of Ireland and Panadol’s Irishness, whilst simultaneously focusing on the voices of the Irish community and individuals who are crucial to the campaign. Though the partnership has evolved over the years, its purpose has remained the same – elevating the provenance of Panadol as a key point of difference within the pain category, whilst celebrating Ireland, its people, and local communities.””
Lucy Else, Brand Manager GBI. Haleon.
Credits
Brand:
Panadol
Media Agency:
Core Sponsorship
Supporting agencies/teams:
Core Research
RTÉ Media Sales
Zenith
Award:
Best Use of TV Sponsorship category at the 2023 TAMI Awards