2022 Bronze Brand Building

Agency: The Story Lab

Client: WeightWatchers

Campaign Name: On the Road to Wellness with WW

Campaign Overview

With 60 years of heritage WeightWatchers is a global leader in weight loss. Its innovative product development has kept pace with trends, but as consumers prioritise holistic health and wellness, the brand known just for weight loss was losing appeal. The need to increase brand consideration was urgent.

Strategy

To create a renewed sense of relevance, the brand partnered with the target audience's favourite show: ITV's This Morning.

WeightWatchers understood that holistic health is essential for sustainable weight loss and had launched a new app including meditation, exercise and tips for overall wellness. Yet it still had old-fashioned associations to dust off.

Rather than simply tell the world the brand had changed, it partnered with ITV’s leading lifestyle show. The match-up provided a unique opportunity to reconnect with the audience, as well as crucially talk to new consumers and also bring the app to life.

In addition to leveraging ITV's on-screen talent, WeightWatchers delivered a range of different messages and bespoke content across This Morning's owned eco-system.

Creativity

Idents reflected the weekly rhythm of wellness mindsets. Supported by an extensive, bespoke content series hosted on This Morning's channels, including the official app, the work authentically demonstrated the brand’s credible expertise in health and wellness.

The brand is now developing its reputation beyond food, linking to health and wellness topics, and carving a niche outside mealtimes to reinforce its manifesto of ‘Building healthy habits for real life’.

The campaign took over an entire ad break following This Morning presenter Josie Gibson on a UK road trip, meeting with WeightWatchers members who shared personal stories of their own wellness journeys.

For ongoing presence, six 'Mindful Monday' ads were produced offering healthy inspiration to get into the right mindset for the week ahead.

Results

The sponsorship activation surpassed the brand’s highest expectations, and impressed ITV with both spontaneous and prompted awareness achieving results that were 40% higher than usual. The engaging creative even inspired Phil and Holly to interact on live TV with the rhubarb custard food ident.

This campaign had such cut-through it successfully drove purchase intent among viewers to double compared to the purchase intent of non-viewers (viewers 45%, non-viewers 23%).

Meanwhile, 62% of viewers agreed that the sponsorship of This Morning made them want to find out more about the brand and its new app. The activity also shifted perceptions and successfully drove positive sentiment towards WeightWatchers to climb 75% higher for viewers compared to non-viewers. This ultimately led to an increase in sign-ups, with a ROAS of 3.5.

The Team

WW - Tony Miller VP, Growth & Performance Marketing - Harriet Grange, Head of Acquisition - Lily Lee-Steere, Senior Campaign Manager

ITV - Geeta Khatani, Daytime Partnerships Manager, Commercial and Online

The Story Lab - Hallie Entwistle, Senior Creation Manager