Innocent enlists Mr. Motivator for new summer music festival
Innocent will host a brand new music festival this summer as part of an ambitious three- year strategy to dramatically increase its advertising presence on television and through digital channels.
The Innocent Unplugged Festival will be held in a secret woodland festival in Kent from the 23-25 May and marks a return to the festival circuit for the juice and smoothie maker, with it previously hosting the FruitStock festival in Regent’s Park up until 2012.
Unplugged will be at a location without wi-fi or 3G/4G connections, and is part of a planned on-going brand messaging to promote the natural and abandoning the distractions of the everyday.
The small festival will include cabaret acts as well as a disco night hosted by 90s fitness TV star Mr Motivator, while social media video ads will also be recorded over the weekend.
“We think the notion of a digital detox is really relevant to society right now and it will be apart of our brand messaging,” said Jamie Sterry, brand activation manager at Innocent.
Sterry says that the long term vision is to expand Innocent Unplugged to locations across Europe and he name-checked Sweden, where Innocent recently launched for the first time, as a possible future location.
In May, Innocent will launch a new range of drinks to fit into the health and well being sector, and this will kick start a rise in ad spend, which is currently split 80% TV and 20% below the line, according to Sterry.
“Over the next three years we will dramatically increase our presence on television with new creatives as we want to be air as much as possible,” he added.
“TV spend will be easily up in 2015 and that will rise over the next three years, we will also spend more on digital marketing than ever before.”
In 2013, Innocent’s European sales shot up 30%, but UK sales dipped 2.4% thanks in part to increased competition in the sector. However, Sterry says European sales were up 50% in 2014 and that UK sales have now flattened out.
“Within five years our ambition is to become Europe’s best selling little juice company and we will invest heavily in the brand to ensure it’s a consistently big seller across the UK,” he added.
Part of that investment, will be in properly communicating that Innocent is full of natural sugars and nutrients from the fruit that we use and not even close to the sugars found in a soft drink like some silly journalist reports will tell you. We have in-house nutritionists and we our commissioning research with a university to show the science behind the health benefits of Innocent drinks. We’re confident the increase in spend will translate to sales.”
