Taylors Of Harrogate
The Bee Hotel
Role: Creative Director, Copywriter
“Wes Anderson-Inspired 'Grand Beedapest Hotel' Is The Best Thing You'll See All Day” - Huffington Post
The Brief
The primary objective of this content was to drive awareness of Taylors Fruit & Herbal teas amongst the core target demographic and communicate the authenticity and quality of the range. Celebrate and communicate the partnership with Kew Gardens and highlight the core messaging: Pure of nature, mighty of flavour.
The Creative
Through social listening I noticed lots of online conversations online amongst our core demographic that centred around the environmental impact of pesticides on pollinators such as bees. There seemed to be plenty of love for our fuzzy, honeyed friends and as nature's original flavour makers it felt right to celebrate them as part of this campaign.
The Results
The film generated a lot of... ahem... buzz clocking up over 650,000 views on Facebook in the first week of launch and driving over 7,000 social interactions. We were also approached by media outlet The Dodo to who asked to upload the film on their Facebook page which delivered added value of an additional 2 million organic views.
The devil is in the details…
“Unbeeeelievable, an inspired-luxury hotel for bees”
“The Grand Beedapest Hotel: the ‘world’s first hotel for bees”
My role as creative director and copywriter meant that I created the concept, the strategy, and was the creative guardian of the entire process. From overseeing the build, to delivering the final edits of the film.
The target audience for this campaign was female skewed (71%) London centric, families and nesters, curious, environmentally conscious, high consideration for switching to FMCG products that are eco friendly. Frequent visitors to museums, exhibits and the cinema.
The recent success of Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest hotel mixed with a pun that was too good to pass up, resulted in the perfect storm for the final concept. There was also a huge trend towards viral videos of miniature film sets built for small and adorable animals, so I took inspiration for this film kind of filming style to inform the creative direction.
The build was managed by food and drink event superstars The Robin Collective, responsible for bringing to life high impact and wonderful food concepts for brands such as Pepsi, KFC and Birdseye. Each room was themed around a flavour of tea from the range and had high attention to detail. We also worked with The Bumblebee Conservation Trust and the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at the University of Reading to learn as much as we could about these magical creatures and create supporting content to further the authenticity of the project. This was a 360 campaign, designed to work across multi platforms and channels and in collaboration with other digital agencies the plan included SEO, PR, blogger outreach and media spend.
Sure we delivered plenty of organic video views, but what else happened?
We had a view through rate of 100% across the three different edits on Instagram. This managed to deliver 5.2K of post likes and an engagement rate of 15% across this platform.
It achieved 31 pieces of media coverage, with standout coverage achieved in titles including Metro.co.uk, Telegraph.co.uk, Mashable and The Huffington Post, generating a PR reach of 9,720,932.
Year on year organic traffic for the main Taylors Tea site increased by 66%. Organic traffic to the main Taylors Tea domain improved 51% comparing four weeks either side of the campaign launch date. Organic traffic to fruit tea pages increased 17% comparing four weeks either side of the campaign launch date. 36% improvement in the number of organic keywords containing 'tea'. Traffic score improved 66% from June to August, notably due to the additional traffic from bee-related keywords.