03 Connect...

Two years after the success of Evian’s Roller Babies video, the brand has launched a new viral campaign aimed at the young at heart: Live Young Spirit. Geared around a Facebook page and a dedicated YouTube channel, the campaign offers Internet users a broad range of supplemental content with a strong emphasis on social media.

Evian’s Let’s Baby Dance website invites visitors to join history’s longest music video—eight hours, twenty minutes and over 39,000 participants as of February 2012—by using a webcam and augmented reality technology to film themselves dancing in the brand’s famous tee.

On the Live Young Training site, visitors can calculate their “youth quotient”—a metric that includes intellectual agility, mindset and physical abilities.

Live Young Community, allows users to join a worldwide Facebook community by posting photos of themselves in the baby tee.

Evian enthusiasts can also buy any of the three different tee-shirt styles on each of the sites, or they can visit the myevian page to design a personalized Evian or Badoit bottle.

This cutting-edge advertising invites consumers to be part of a completely new brand affinity experience— and sales are up as a result. In 2011 Evian reported worldwide growth of 4%.

Did you know it?

Since its launch two years ago, Evian’s Live Young roller baby video has been viewed more than 180 million times on YouTube, making it one of the most-watched films in advertising history.

Working with state-of the art hospitals, Dumex and the international organization Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) have set up more than 100 nutritional counselling centers in 70 of China’s largest cities. Their mission: inform pregnant women and make them aware of proper nutrition for themselves and their baby.

Dietary imbalances are a source of major metabolic disorders in China, which has one of the sharpest increases in the number of obese infants, especially in Beijing and Shanghai. The Survey on epidemiology 2006 reported that the rate of obesity in Chinese children under seven had tripled in 10 years.

An outgrowth of Danone’s 2010 partnership with milk producers, the “Danone au lait de nos éleveurs” program cultivates ties with producers to provide them with a steady income, make them more competitive, and ensure optimum milk quality for consumers.

Now under way in France and Belgium, the program features a quality charter signed with producers and a 360° campaign that uses the web, social networks, blogs, television commercials and billboards to promote these commitments and answer questions from the public.

On the Danone France and Danone Belgium websites, consumers can track their yogurt, using barcodes on the packaging to identify the dairy plant and milk collection area that produced it.

In Belgium, farmers have even invited consumers to visit one of the 235 farms that supply the Rotselaar plant, Danone’s biggest.

And in France the program has generated over 430 million contacts with consumers after only one year. Of those, over 50% were generated by new media buzz.

Cow & Gate, the Baby Nutrition division’s leading brand in the UK, is using a telephone hotline, a website and a Facebook page to provide free, personalized advice to pregnant women and new mothers. The Cow&Gate community discusses a wide range of issues, including good nutrition during pregnancy, information and advice on successful breastfeeding, and major dietary phases in children up to 36 months old. Pediatricians, general practitioners and other health professionals can access a similar service on a dedicated Cow & Gate site: www.in-practice.co.uk.

In 2011, our Medical Nutrition division in the UK created a website for general practitioners, providing information and answering questions on the problem of cow’s milk protein intolerance in newborns. Developed in partnership with doctors.net.uk, the country’s largest network of practitioners, the new platform has reached nearly 8,500 physicians and won the Pharmaceutical Marketing Society’s 2011 prize for the best informational website for health professionals. Building on this success, Neocate has partnered with the British Allergy Foundation to launch a site geared to laypeople and designed for parents of children with cow’s milk allergies: www.cowsmilkallergy.co.uk.

Raise young people’s awareness of biodiversity

In eight countries where the group does business—Germany, Austria, Brazil, France, Poland, Argentina, Mexico and the United States— the Danonino brand (sold in France as Petit Gervais aux Fruits) has begun a “Plant a tree” campaign. First launched in Brazil in 2010, the campaign has now been rolled out in the United States and in four countries in Europe, where it raises young people’s awareness of biodiversity by including a packet of seeds in each pack of yogurt.

In Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, children can also plant a virtual tree on the brand’s website using a code on the package. For every code they enter, the brand’s partner NGOs have pledged to plant a tree in a disaster area. By the end of 2011, over 100,000 trees had been planted.

Got a question about Actimel? Danone Germany will answer it. Managers at our German subsidiary have pledged to provide responsive, fact-based answers within 48 hours when consumers post questions to the halloactimel.de website. This puts the public in direct contact with the people who know the product best, opening up a dialog that transcends conventional advertising and corporate communications.