PADI is the world’s largest ocean exploration and diver organisation, operating in 186 countries and territories. They have a global network of more than 6,600 dive centres and resorts, with over 128,000 professional members worldwide.
Issuing more than 1 million certifications each year, and with over 29 million certifications issued to date, they positively transform lives and create ocean change by making the wonder of the underwater world available to all. PADI is undeniably ‘The Way the World Learns to Dive®’.
The Challenge
The brief was three-part.
- Establish a strategic marketing framework – although PADI already owns 80% of the diving market, we needed to re-package the brand consumer messaging to be simplified and digestible. We were also tasked with creating new and prioritised personas, establishing a meaningful brand proposition with supporting brand values and devising a growth hacking strategy to reach new audiences via innovative new channels.
- Create a global targeted audience acquisition campaign – PADI has always been known as a scuba diving brand, but to attract new divers, we needed to share their obsession with the ocean so broadly and consistently, that it would open up a whole new audience to diving and ocean conservation.
- Devise an overarching campaign rollout plan – we needed to create a plan that would allow PADI to show up in new, unique and strategic channels that would resonate with their priority personas.
The Result
We live in an ‘Instagram world’ where everything is filtered, perfectly curated and at times, completely unrealistic. It’s a current, major issue that will resonate with a lot of people that feel that the world presented to them is fake.
As a result, we are starting to see a shift towards the use of #NoFilter and more natural, raw content… Not to mention that diving is one of the very few activities globally where you and your phone are separated, leaving you to explore the underwater world in its natural ‘unfiltered’ beauty.
We always say that ‘great campaigns are based on great insights’ and this one was no different. Our ‘Unfiltered’ campaign was informed by a huge number of different aspects:
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International immersion sessions
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Persona development, testing and regional adaptation
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Briefing doc development to align all departments and geographies on what success looks like
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Extensive strategic workshops with the PADI leadership team
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Use of our strategic marketing framework to underpin and inform our decision making
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Wider market benchmarking and key learnings exercise
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A refined brand proposition and supporting values
Having created PADI’s global, audience-specific campaign, we then created a rollout plan to serve as a reference guide for marketing best practice and to ensure consistency and clarity of messaging across all key channels and territories, with the ability to customize regionally.
Key campaign statistics
75,000+
Landing page visits
500,000
Social engagements
500,000+
Video views
46,400,000
Reach
*LiveUnfiltered hashtag performance as taken from BrandMentions.
”"When I first started working at Brandwave, PADI was on the hit list of brands I wanted to work with. I consider it a career highlight to have helped to produce such a successful global campaign."
ALASTAIR LECOMTECreative Director - Brandwave
”"The brief was clear from the outset – take the PADI brand to people and places it hadn’t been before. To see our Live Unfiltered campaign come to life on a global scale has been incredible. I'm proud to share PADI's obsession with the ocean and look forward to continuing our work together to attract new divers."
WILLIAM COWELLSenior Account Manager - Brandwave
”"While PADI has a strong brand identity and mission, Brandwave helped us refine our customer-facing purpose and designed a complete marketing campaign around the learnings of the engagement. What resulted were multi-channel, targeted, new-diver acquisition plans and activations that could be leveraged through existing company capabilities and new ones as well.
The PADI Unfiltered campaign is reaching potential new divers in several different, defined audience segments across multiple channels and communicating a message of exploration and conservation that is allowing us to bring more people into our amazing underwater world and leveraging their enthusiasm to help us protect the ocean for generations to come."
ANDY LEISNERPADI Worldwide - Chief Consumer Officer
”“Working with Brandwave in a truly collaborative way enabled our team to take ownership of a global, but regionalized approach to drive interest in the sport of scuba diving, as well as identifying our specific high value target audience. The Brandwave team were diligent in their approach, keeping us on track but injecting new and creative thought leadership to a visual and messaging approach that resulted in us connecting with prospective divers in a more disruptive way than we had in the past. All this on top of just being a superb group of people to work with – we are more than happy to count them as a part of our team and look forward to a continued partnership!”
LISA NICKLINPADI Worldwide - Vice President, Consumer Marketing
