Congratulations to our portfolio company Tanvas for receiving a Media Lion at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. MediaCom Israel’s BabyFace campaign, in partnership with Gillette and powered by TanvasTouch®, received a Silver Lion award for Excellence in Media Insights & Strategy. Tanvas is thrilled to have contributed to this campaign and honored to receive a Media Lion. This is the most coveted award in the creative and marketing communications industry, celebrating the implementation of inspiring and innovative ideas.
Gillette’s BabyFace campaign set out to persuade expecting fathers to shave their beards in the interest of growing closer to their newborn children. Research at Harvard University and The Boston Children’s Hospital shows skin-on-skin touch communication helps babies develop and bond with their parents. The campaign aimed to inspire new fathers to shave their beards thereby offering their newborn children this essential skin-to-skin contact.
MediaCom hoped to make this campaign all the more convincing by making it experiential — showing dads and dads-to-be what stubble actually felt like to babies.The perfect solution to this was TanvasTouch. Tanvas’s first-of-its-kind haptics technology allowed users to run their finger over a touchscreen to feel — as a baby would — the stubble of a beard compared to that of a smooth face. TanvasTouch technology makes feeling simulated textures (such as beard stubble or shaving cream) possible through precisely controlling friction.
This application of TanvasTouch was promoted at maternity wards, birth classes, and baby fairs in order to share this touch experience with new parents and parents-to-be. The MediaCom app allowed users to interact by feeling the stubble, applying and feeling shaving cream, and shaving the beard, giving these men an authentic sense of what newborn babies feel when touching their fathers. Through this campaign, the power of TanvasTouch exposed dads to the emotional lives of newborns, convincing many of them to shave.
The use of TanvasTouch technology in this campaign was a media-first in advertising, and proved to be very effective. The media immediately picked up on MediaCom’s creative application of Tanvas’s technology, and discussions around the research and insights on which it is based earned media value in excess of $200,000. Post-campaign research found a 15% boost in consideration to shave amongst bearded dads. Despite the fact that bearded new dads are just a fraction of Gillette’s user base, and that Gillette was already dominating nearly 80% of the market, there was still a 9% increase in sales thanks to the BabyFace campaign. To view additional details about this campaign, visit the Cannes Lion 2018 Winners, Shortlist and Talks website (login required) or on the MediaCom website.
We congratulate Tanvas on enabling MediaCom to display the sense of touch, which was so critical to their success on their Silver Lion for the BabyFace campaign. This campaign also won two Festival of Media Global Awards including Gold for Creative Use of Media and Silver for Best Use of Technology. Do you have the next Silver Lion idea powered by TanvasTouch? Visit Tanvas at https://tanvas.co/agencies/.
