Case Study: Evenflo Turns to Online Video Marketing to Engage Millennial Parents

Evenflo, the marketer of child car seats, infant feeding products and other baby gear has done little, if any online marketing until this summer when it launched “The Savvy Parents Guide” campaign. The primarily digital communications platform seeks to position Evenflo as a savvy and empathetic partner in the frequently overwhelming business of parenting.

After all, trying to remove the baby from the car seat without dislodging the entire apparatus from the backseat can be rather daunting. Even Bethenny Frankel, reality show and real-life mom on Bravo’s “Bethenny Getting Married?” had trouble figuring it out.

In “The Savvy Parents Guide”, Evenflo thinks it’s found a fun and engaging approach to helping first-time parents along. The company targets millennial parents with a series of tongue-in-cheek webisodes that offer tips on child safety while also illustrating frequently hilarious parenting moments. For example, “How to Repair Your Husband’s Bruised Ego” shows a dad’s struggle to install a car seat (it sounds a lot like sex), then offers the “Savvy Parents” way to install Evenflo’s Momentum 65 convertible car seat.

The webisodes are anchored by a microsite that includes bloggers highlighting their unique approaches to parenting, parenting tips, time-saving hints and resources, tweets, product information and an opt-in newsletter. The campaign is supported with paid advertising on parenting websites, as well as editorial links and coverage on forums, blogs and communities. The dive into webisodes is rather bold considering the brand hasn’t done branded entertainment, let alone online video before. But millennials are online and they’re consuming plenty of video.

In fact, 25- to 34-year-old US online users consumer the most video of any age group with bits of incremental growth through 2014. After millennials, the 35- to 44-year-old age cohort are the next big consumers of online video.

Evenflo’s decision to leverage video content and tie it to specific star products like its car seat makes sense–75% of millennials tap into video and 71% buy stuff online, according to a study by Microsoft Advertising conducted by Survey Sampling and Russell Research. Sure, Evenflo wants to sell more product but it’s also showing it can entertain and relate to the many trials-by-fire of millennial parents.

I spoke recently with Chris Craig, Evenflo’s chief marketing officer, about the company’s efforts to reach and cultivate relationships with millennial parents using online video, a first for the company. Here’s a snippet from the full interview available on eMarketer Total Access.

eMarketer: What are you trying to achieve with “The Savvy Parents Guide campaign”?

Chris Craig:

Evenflo is seeking to engage our consumer, and we chose video as the primary means of engagement. A key insight for us is that parents take the role of parenting very seriously and sometimes we forget about the fun and pleasure that’s involved in raising kids. The insight for us was you do all this work, read all these books, ask for all this advice and then you’re a parent and it’s never anything like you expected.

The campaign is a communications platform that we hope will help consumers understand Evenflo. We’ve been in the baby products business for 90 years and have a terrific amount of expertise in the category. We want to help new parents.

Evenflo doesn’t have all the answers, but we know where to find them. “The Savvy Parents Guide” is also an advertising platform that can come alive in a variety of product categories. The webisodes attempt to inject humor into the challenging situations you find yourself in as a parent. The goal for us is to stimulate conversation. Webisodes are perfect for an online and social-media-driven campaign. They are conversation starters online and off.

eMarketer: The target audience for this campaign is millennial parents. How do you define that demographic?

Craig:

Our overall audience is 22 to 35 and millennials are a smaller slice of that—about 22 to 30 or so. For Evenflo, the defining psychographic or demographic is this is an online generation. They’re very comfortable digitally. Our objective is to find millennial parents where they want to be found, where they expect to be found and engage them the way they expect to be engaged.

eMarketer: What kind of digital media and marketing has Evenflo done?

Craig:

Evenflo experimented with banner advertising about two years ago, but otherwise has not done much digital advertising.

eMarketer: Are the webisodes destined for television?

Craig:

No, this campaign is an online campaign. This is branded entertainment. Using online and print, millennial parents are remarkably targetable. Outside of online and print, it becomes much more difficult for us to justify the spend. We’ve done mostly trade-based media until now.

eMarketer: Have you purchased media to promote the webisodes?

Craig:

We’re doing paid media for the first phase of the campaign to get the word out about the webisodes. Our ad buy is on parenting- and mom-oriented sites. We have purchased specific areas on several online hubs, including iVillage, Nickelodeon and Disney Parenting, as well as WebMD, Babble, Parents and CafeMom. Our ads will appear in approximately 500 blogs as well.

In subsequent phases, we’ll use earned media and work closely with independent bloggers. We have a blogger ambassador who has the savvy, knowing voice of Evenflo.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access clients only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

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