Proud Sponsor of Cancelled Events
With small budgets and big ambitions, ROM has always managed to activate the national spirit and bring people together around different causes.
So at a time when the world was overwhelmed with bad news, cancellation and a massive gap of entertainment, brave local chocolate brand ROM found an opportunity.
They set out to be the official sponsor of cancelled events.
We chose to use a bold POV — to disrupt the conversation and bring a smile to people’s faces in times when they needed it most.
RECOGNITION
Cannes Lions — Bronze
Effie Awards — Bronze
— Listen to more of Ioana’s insight on this experience
With this campaign — and I think with all of the work on ROM in particular, I think — we start from the product, from the fact that it’s bittersweet and it has all this wonderful particularity. But it extends to cross-channel communication. It impacts people on so many different levels. And I think it plays the part of… sort of like a national inspiration. So basically, you could have an experience with this product, but it’s much more than that. You get to experience ideas, you get to experience ambition. And this is what I think is great, and it’s probably how we applied this theory without knowing it. That probably won’t make it on the edit but... um…
ROM Buzz seized the opportunity to turn a negative into a positive, while also finding a way to put Romania on the big scene and on the radar of young people.
The campaign kicked off with several pieces of entertaining video content in which a ROM representative pitches organizers all kinds of crazy sponsorship ideas: from chocolate-filled arenas for Wimbledon, to crazy national flags at the EURO football tournament, to our own proposed mascot for Comicon — the Rom Buzz Man.
With messaging that directly targeted cancelled events in Romania — or any cancelled event in the world, for that matter — event organizers were encouraged to visit ROM microsite to find a unique sponsorship package for their event.
ROM also activated the consumer base to play a role in the mission and help this small Romanian brand sponsor a big international event — they were given a chance to join in and spread the outrageous offers to reach the organizers.
Most of the conversations took place on our social media channels — while we couldn’t tag the event organizers as a brand, we were able to do it through influencers and fans of the page.
We developed a real-time response strategy. So when a new event would unfortunately get cancelled — a festival, concert or marathon, for example — we were able to immediately start targeting it and produce new content on social media. We also reignited the conversation every time a cancellation was trending in the news.
Select opinion leaders were also leveraged to further amplify the conversation. For example, we were able to partner with Romanian tennis star Simona Halep to respond to our proposal for Wimbledon.
At a local level, we actively sought out smaller events to bring into the initiative. For each cancelled event, we developed a sponsorship package that offered free chocolate to anyone who had a ticket.
SOM
3.4% SOM in the Coated Wafers category
(3 times more than expected)
SALES
Top 3 best-sold ROM SKUs
ENGAGEMENT
Signed 11+ local sponsorships
(paid in chocolate, which some argue is better than money)
SOCIAL
4,842,677 page engagements in Facebook and Instagram
SOCIAL
43% view rate
(25% benchmark)
SOCIAL
79.1% of the target audience reached
BRAND SENTIMENT
The much-desired Gen Zers paid attention to the campaign
(contributing to an overall positive sentiment)