Today we launched Bring It Back!, a social media campaign we devised for Ashley and Martin.

The campaign concept is simple - losing things sucks. Your favourite food gets discontinued, a great television show get canceled, bands break up… but you’re in luck, Ashley and Martin wants to help bring it back.

Background
If you aren’t familiar, Ashley and Martin is the largest medical hair centre in the Southern Hemisphere [translation: they help you regrow your hair, medically]. We met with them a couple of weeks ago and they asked us to come up with a social media campaign idea, so Marc and I poured ourselves a glass of wine and pondered how we might make the topic of hair loss fun and engaging. Here’s our thinking: Hair loss is not fun and engaging.

It’s true – people that get these treatments generally want to get it done, grow back their hair and never speak of it again (okay, so I guess that means we’ll skip the Facebook Fan Page). Yes, we could have created a community for people to discuss and share information about hair loss, but those forums already exist (and let’s be honest, that’s not all that fun). Or perhaps we should have produced clever videos that take the edge off hair loss… except they’ve already done that.

Okay, so then what?

We decided that we didn’t have to talk specifically about medical research, statistics and success rates to support the brand. Besides, we can’t compete with the hunk on the beach that’s already out there telling you about those things. So, we decided we’d broaden our scope a little and make it about losing things. Since the goal was to keep it fun and lighthearted, we made the focus on nostalgia and bygone things from the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s.

The campaign is driven from a Tumblr blog which features pictures, videos, text and links of popular things that are no longer around. We pre-populated the site with content, but this has been designed with the plan that it will become self-sustaining via user submissions. Participation is incentivised with a contest where each week the best submission gets $500. Our original idea was that we’d bring back the item for each week’s winner (it’s amazing how many extinct products you can actually buy on eBay), but then we soon realised that we’d have a hard time fulfilling certain things that people might want to bring back, i.e. Hummers and Michael Jackson.

We chose to use Tumblr as the platform for a few reasons.

1. It’s free (HOORAY!).
2. Falling in between micro and macro blogging, Tumblr was built for the bite size bits of content we wanted to use.
3. Tumblr was built for sharing – literally; users can reblog and like posts with just one click. Furthermore, it’s also the culture of the platform; content gets posted and reposted (tumbles, if you will) until it eventually becomes this long nested chain of user commentary.

Benefits

You’re probably thinking, if you aren’t talking about the product, what’s in it for Ashley and Martin? A few things, actually.

- Branding. The science of hair regrowth hasn’t changed much in the past couple of decades, so the service surrounding the product becomes very important. What we’re aiming to do is make people feel comfortable with the brand, to reminisce with it. It’s already a bit of a scary subject, so let’s open the conversation with pogo sticks and trapper keepers rather than scary men in lab coats. We used a punchy line to tie it back to the brand: Ashley and Martin – bringing it back since 1964 which is discretely placed on just a couple places on the site. We wanted the content to sit front and center.

- Distribution. This is the sort of thing people can send to their friends without feeling awkward about it. Again, it’s all about the content.

- SEO. Social content is a key driver of natural search. (reblogs, tweets and comments = social content.)

Building out this campaign has all been a lot of fun; but, as is the case with hair treatments, there’s no substitute for measurable results.  (…to be continued.)

So, upload a picture of an Atari or your Hypercolor t-shirt and let us know what you think in the comments.