12,000
clicks

239%
engagement rate above industry average

300+
event responses

Winner
- 2020 Social Media Strategy (Agency Run).
- Social Media Awards, Bronze.

Objective
Fyffes wanted to create a fun and creative campaign to raise awareness of the Fyffes brand messaging while also boosting people’s morale during the COVID-19 lockdown. 

Solution
The Fyffes Great Banana Bread Bake Off (GBBBO) was created by 256 to meet the brief and position Fyffes as the ‘rightful owner’ of the 2020 social media trend in Ireland of baking banana bread during lockdown.  

With Fyffes GBBBO, 256 believed that Fyffes could engage and gather a new audience of banana bread bakers, capturing the sentiment of the nation and generating positive brand sentiment with high-quality user-generated content.

Taking inspiration from TV cookery competitions, 256 brought in a familiar face, celebrity chef Donal Skehan, to front the campaign.

Partnering with a beloved celebrity chef who was going through the same lockdown-related challenges with his young growing family as our target audiences, helped drive entries and engagements.

To extend the reach of Fyffes GBBBO, we created a number of different categories including Best Styling, Best Junior Baker, Best Vegan, Best Gluten-Free and Best Ingredients, with Donal announcing the winners over social media. 

The high energy creative content was snackable, upbeat and stood out on the user’s feed, especially at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

256 devised a multimodal distribution method putting prospective entrants and budding chefs at the centre of the campaign. Engagement was driven through a custom-built Fyffes Great Banana Bread Bake Off competition landing page, social media posts, a suite of content assets, paid social ads and seeding content across digital partners and PR.

Check out the campaign on Instagram and Facebook.

Results
Fyffes captured the essence of 'Ireland's banana bread moment', with double the expected amount of competition entries. The campaign reached over 380,000 people through our social campaign alone, with 276,000 total video views.

This was further compounded by the huge reach of Donal Skehan’s own social channels, a PR campaign through PR partners Hall PR, native content pieces in national magazine Easyfood and Everymum, and radio ads on Today FM via InSight Marketing & brand Services.

With an engagement rate of 4% (excluding video views) the campaign blew all industry benchmarks with an engagement rate 239% above the average. Several hundred new followers were gained over the course of the campaign along with 300+ event responses and over 12,000 link clicks. Valuable backlinks from press coverage were earned for the brand in a variety of national news and online channels.

The campaign was even spotted by The National Museum of Ireland and they’ve asked for the winners and their banana breads to be written down in the history books as part of their upcoming COVID-19 exhibition.

Ultimately, the campaign drove massive brand awareness and engagement for Fyffes and cemented the brand’s place as a creative, engaging and a positive force in an otherwise troubling time.

We were delighted to win bronze at the 2020 Sockies in the Social Media Strategy category for the work.

Testimonial
"The #GBBBO campaign was our first time working with a celebrity chef, and Donal Skehan was a great fit with our brand…plus a pleasure to deal with! When 256 came to us with the idea, we knew that they had tapped into the sentiment of the nation; as the country began to open up slowly in summer, families had perfected their banana bread skills during lockdown, and we now wanted them to show us their creations."

"The campaign went even better than expected – we had hundreds of entries from all across Ireland and over 320,000 total engagements on social, including Donal’s video views. We were so impressed with the level of entries, right across all categories. This was very much a feel-good campaign that got people talking and baking, and was closely aligned with our brand and target audience. Thanks to all the team in 256 for making it a campaign to remember." 

Emma Hunt Duffy
Sales & Marketing Manager (Fyffes)