Oakley Inc. is looking for an advertising agency to handle the creative work on a global marketing campaign that will give an inside view of the $1.5 billion eyewear and apparel brand.
The Foothill Ranch-based company—a unit of Luxottica Group SPA in Milan, Italy—doesn’t disclose specifics on its budget; industry observers estimate its annual spending on marketing at about $100 million.
The “Disruptive by Design” campaign will mark the brand’s 30th anniversary and focus on its “unique point of view” and innovations in eyewear technology, according to the company.
“The real value of this brand is in its culture,” said Chief Executive Colin Baden. “If we could find some way to take that culture and capture it in a can, we would be the most powerful brand in the world.”
Everything
Everything Oakley is on the table, including its bunker-style headquarters, which will be featured in one phase of the campaign, according to Pierre Martin, brand director for the company.
“We want to open the doors of Oakley to our consumers and get them more engaged in who we are as a brand,” Martin said. “We have a ton of stories to tell, but we always kept them inside of the building. Everybody who would come in to the building would have this tremendous experience with us as a brand, and we really want to be able to share that.”
Oakley announced the campaign to a crowd of about 1,000 last week during an invitation-only party at Red Studios in Hollywood—part of company founder Jim Jannard’s Irvine-based Red Digital Cinema Camera Co.
The three-pronged campaign will focus on the brand’s legacy, its sponsored athletes, and its eyewear technology.
The heritage component will feature Jannard, the headquarters on One Icon, and previously unreleased blueprints of early inventions. Professional athletes, such as cyclist Greg LeMond, surfer Richie Collins and golfer David Duval, will be part of another component of the Oakley campaign.
“We realized that (the) ‘disruptive’ part was not only part of us as a brand launching [products] 30 years ago that kind of disrupted the world of sunglasses and sport, but we also realized over the years that we always targeted athletes through our sponsorship programs who are disruptive in their world,” Martin said. “Shaun White scoring a 10 in the X Games is a great example of him disrupting his own sport to rewrite the manual of snowboarding.”
Martin said Oakley hopes to hire an ad shop for creative—it doesn’t currently have an agency of record—in the next two months. The winner will take over from London-based four23, which worked on the launch of the campaign on a project basis.
OMD Worldwide in New York is handling media buying.
The campaign will focus on branding messages for most of 2014, with product ads expected to start in the fourth quarter. The ads will include Prizm lens tint technology, a “color enhancement, significant enough that when you wear it, your brain processes color differently,” Martin said. “New creative will come out toward the end of the year, so we definitely need the agency to come; the earlier the better.”
Oakley also works with Moment Factory in Canada and Skiver Advertising in Newport Beach. Its most recent agency of record was Factory Design Labs in Denver.
The “Disruptive by Design” campaign will run in Oakley’s key international markets: Australia, Brazil, China, Europe, Japan, North America and South Africa.
“We are looking at a 360-activation around the campaign,” Martin said, referring to an all-inclusive type of marketing approach, which will consist of print and digital advertising, online video and social media.
There are no specific plans for TV advertising at this point, but it’s likely.
“Broadcast is a significant investment for us,” Martin said. “We know it will be a part of our mix sooner rather than later. … What we are looking at is reaching that younger demographic through YouTube posts” and other digital advertising in the meantime.
Print ads will appear in ESPN the Magazine and Sports Illustrated, among other sports publications.
Conde Nast
Oakley also has formed a “brand alliance” with New York-based Conde Nast’s Wired magazine to develop “co-created and sponsored multimedia content” that will appear in international print editions and on Wired.com.
“We believe they are (a) very valuable partner because they have a disruptive approach,” Martin said.
Branding Oakley has its challenges, and the new campaign will have to deal with them.
“For us, the biggest discussion internally is how we keep the balance of the brand when you’re talking to so many different audiences,” he said. “There are three levels of consumers we always targeted as a brand. There is the front-row, competitive athlete, the high-performance individual. Second level is that weekend warrior that goes out to do a 5K, and then there is the sports fan. So depending on where we go and how we interact with this consumer, we address that. And the most important thing for us is to keep the balance to the brand. We can’t shift too much on one side and forget another.”
