Our Challenge
The Summer promotion for Unilever’s Persil is their Be My Coach campaign, devised to encourage kids to get outside with their favourite coaches – their parents! Persil teamed up with Nickelodeon to produce a commercial project which would target Nickelodeon’s 6-10 year old audience and their Mums and Dads. Jam Creative were commissioned by Nickelodeon to develop a concept which would be as engaging as programming, but that could run in commercial air time.

Our Solution
Persil’s promotion centres on a ‘Coaching Kit’ – a ‘Skills’ ball, stopwatch, Steven Gerrard Coaching DVD and ‘Skills’ games. We wanted to see how kids and their parents reacted to the coaching kit, and given time, and the coaching of their parents, whether or not the kid’s skills could improve.

So we decided to film three families over the course of a week in ‘reality TV’ style, and on the final day to bring the families together at Bisham Abbey, the National Sports Centre in Hertfordshire, to show off their improvement. We created 12 x 2 minute commercials, to air in 4 phases, telling the consecutive stories of the families’ progression.

On air, Nickelodeon trail the commercials during the day to an appointment to view at 5pm. All 12 spots are also available to view on the www.persilbemycoach.co.uk website.

Importantly, we had to construct the ads so they felt very much like programming, especially with regard to what has happened in previous episodes, and what is coming up next. So in effect the spots work as stand alone pieces as well as being effective as a set.

Result
The campaign has run very successfully over the summer, and Nickelodeon, Persil and their affiliate agencies have been delighted with the work.

We have additionally produced film work for Michaelides and Bednash, the agency behind the 360 degree marketing concept of the promotion, shooting an online promotion to publicise the Persil Be My Coach Event held in August 2006, and a film of the event to be webcast on AOL.