Boppi the Booty Shakin’ Llama from ZURU
In A Nutshell…
How can you build excitement for a bum-wriggling toy llama? That’s the question our client ZURU posed as they sought to make Boppi the Booty-Shakin’ Llama the must-have toy of 2019.
Approach
Looking at Boppi’s bottom-jiggling antics, the Playtime PR team got a very-definite sense… This toy would appeal to mischievous adults as much as to their children! With trade-show research confirming this, we began looking to target those that would lap up Boppi’s ‘kidult’ appeal. In addition, our client’s insight on the girls’ electronic toys category showed how retailers and consumers were looking for innovative new products like Boppi.
Execution
Building on the excitement surrounding Boppi’s trade launch, we chose activations that would best showcase the product. Taking Boppi to the Christmas in July festival helped kickstart our consumer campaign. With over 800 top-tier media and quality influencers, the event became an ideal media showcase for Boppi. It also provided the pivotal moment as a ‘first time to see’, with immediate exposure on ITV News as part of their report from the show.
Obviously, we saw inclusion in Christmas gift guides as being key to Boppi’s seasonal success. For that reason, our gift-guide targeting team began a timely and relentless drive to ensure all opportunities were explored and covered.
Also, while social-media and entertainment publisher LADBible may not seem like the obvious media partner for promoting a toy, we felt it was perfect for focussing on Boppi’s massive kidult appeal. As a channel followed by half of all UK men aged 18-24, and a fifth of all UK women in the same age bracket, we identified LADBible as the most-effective platform to produce creative and shareable content, reach a global community and inspire the creation and delivery of great social content.
In November 2019, we also took Boppi to DreamToys… Said to start “the real countdown to Christmas”, this event invites media representatives to see “must-have toys” as chosen by a cross section of retailers. We also began to encourage highly-shareable online content with the potential to go viral while implementing a comprehensive media-relations campaign. With this, we began to target audiences via primary girls’ magazines, and consumer press and broadcast.
Finally, during the key drive period, our team began executing a celebrity product-seeding programme to generate organic word-of-mouth and non-paid user-generated content.
Results
Playtime PR ran an integrated campaign featuring creative media-relations outreach and a contagious content drive. As a result, the lovable llama made appearances in 500+ articles. Overall media relations won coverage with a reach of over 970 million. Our Christmas in July activity directly resulted in coverage on regional ITV News, This Morning, and How to Spend it Well at Christmas.
The Dream Toys event alone secured extensive national-media coverage on television and radio as well as in newspapers and consumer magazines. Local radio and newspapers followed suit while all bodies promoted the toy across social media. The posts resulting from celebrity product seeding were positive, providing a boost in engagement and a spike in product searches. Other online-video content went viral, gaining over a million views in just 48 hours.
In short, our campaign successfully got the nation talking about Boppi. The booty-shaking, laughter-making toy featured prominently in Christmas gift guides for This Morning, The Sun on Sunday, Evening Standard, Huffington Post, Woman’s Own and Prima.