Axe: Men Do Apologize

Challenge

Axe has strategically taken steps over the past 2-years to combat the idea of toxic masculinity. This year, Axe focused on breaking the gender stereotype that “Men do not apologize.”

Our brief was to find a way to take attention of our target audience to this topic and create buzz around that. To create awareness around the stereotype of “Real Men don’t apologize” and break this toxic masculinity by generating talkability on social media.

Strategy

Çukur (The Pit) is one of the most popular and most watched TV Series in Turkey that tells the story of a dangerous neighborhood run by a noble mafia family. Since every episode of Çukur (The Pit) has been watched by 5 million people on average and the male characters had been representing all the wrong gender stereotypes that Axe fights against, it was a perfect environment for us to spread the message. TV Adbox (A hybrid broadcast broadband TV technology) is a new technology that enables advertisers to create interactive ads on TV.  So, we created a TV integration project that combines the popular TV series, TV Adbox technology and social media.

Insight

Çukur was one of the most watched TV shows by men and it was a perfect environment for us since it tells the story of men that represents all wrong gender stereotypes that we fight against. We wanted to show all TV audience that even the toughest men can apologize. Moreover, we knew that every new episode of Çukur was a new thrill for the audience since they were very curious about what will happen in a scenario. The show was also one of the most talked about topics on social media. People love to comment on episodes and try to guess what will happen next. For the first time in Turkish TV history, we gave the audience a chance to decide what will happen next on their favorite show in real-time.

Execution

Çukur was created in collaboration with scriptwriters, scripted 4 conflict scenes in which 4 different actors hurt another character’s feelings. Viewers were asked via frame ads: “Which character should apologize? Send your choice via Smart TV remote control or on social media. The most voted character would apologize in the same episode while streamed on TV!” Each character was assigned a specific color on the remote control. Viewers were able to send votes via Twitter. Results were shared after the first half of the episode. We broadcast apology scene of most-voted character, aired another frame ad on TV; “Share your apology with the hashtag on Twitter”.  Apology messages shared and we broadcast selected ones on TV.

Results

The episode was watched by 5 million people. In total, 5249 votes were collected through Smart TVs and Social Media. (1582 from Smart TV, 3667 votes from social media.) 3568 apology messages were shared on Twitter with our hashtag #Kırdıysakozurdileriz We reached 1.216.226 people on Twitter.