The Brief

SMA has been leading baby nutrition research for over 100 years but due to a crowded market, not everyone knows that. The brief to COW was to make the brand stand for something in the minds of consumers and cement the positioning that SMA is the brand of nutritional expertise. We needed to create a campaign that was warm and playful in line with the brand’s tone of voice but that also made parents sit up and take notice – to drive conversation and talkability amongst parents without talking about any of the products or their benefits due to regulation restrictions. .

The Big Idea

To showcase the importance of Vitamin D and Iron for toddlers, we launched the UK’s first Baby 'TRYathlon': a fun, age-appropriate and playful take on super serious endurance events like 'Ironman'.

Fronted by the two-year-old son of former Olympic swimming gold medallist Rebecca Adlington, the event saw a seven-strong squad of infant TRYathletes aged between 12 months and 30 months compete in three fun heats.

The TRYathlon event followed a three-week social-first coaching programme that saw the little ones take part in a series of challenges across social media around sleep, nutrition, and movement to help them prepare for the big day.

The COW studio team was responsible for creating a campaign landing page and making a suite of content for use across social, digital and earned media.

The Results

We achieved nine national pieces of coverage in the likes of The Sunday Times, Metro, Express and the Mirror. 78% of articles included key campaign messaging around the importance of vitamins and 89% of articles mentioned the product.

From a social perspective, the campaign reached over 80,000 people and saw 15 pieces of bespoke content from influencers and talent – all content was positively received and exceeded the KPIs for engagement.

The campaign was a huge success for the brand and showed what PR can achieve even within such a regulated space.