Title	CLOSE THE LOOP
Brand	H & M HENNES & MAURITZ
Product/Service	CLOTHING, FOOTWEAR & ACCESSORIES
Category	A02. Corporate Responsibility
Entrant Company	FORSMAN & BODENFORS Gothenburg, SWEDEN
Advertising Agency	FORSMAN & BODENFORS Gothenburg, SWEDEN
Production Company	CALLBOY Stockholm, SWEDEN

Name	Company	Position
Anna Qvennerstedt	Forsman/Bodenfors	Copywriter
Karin Frisell	Forsman/Bodenfors	Art Director
Leif Sorte	Forsman/Bodenfors	Account Supervisor
Joachim Levin	Forsman/Bodenfors	Account Manager
Ellinor Bjarnolf	Forsman/Bodenfors	Designer
Maja Bredberg	Forsman/Bodenfors	Pr
Jenny Ring/Joel Borg	Forsman/Bodenfors	Music Supervisor
Magnus Kennhed	Forsman/Bodenfors	Film Agency Producer
Helena Wård	Forsman/Bodenfors	Digital Agency Producer
Erik Zetterberg	H/M Inhouse	Head Of Creative
Daniel Herrmann	H/M Inhouse	Head Of Marketing
Pär Zetterberg	H/M Inhouse	Project Manager
Lars Nilsson	H/M Inhouse	Producer Film
Erik Hagström	H/M Inhouse	Operative Project Manager Digital
Maria Giertz	H/M Inhouse	Project Manager Social Media
Karin Brinck	H/M Inhouse	Project Manager Sustainability
Annika Sandström	H/M Inhouse	Head Of Media
Anna Eriksson	H/M Inhouse	Pr
Max Vitali	Callboy	Director
Mattias Rudh	Callboy	D.o.p

The Campaign

The objective was to create awareness around the global Garment Collecting Program, where H&M collects unwanted garments in all their 3,300 stores. The clothes are then reused or recycled. This was a global campaign with a limited budget, relying heavily on this viral film. Through what we wear, we can tell a lot about ourselves. Our personality, our values, our origin, our social class, our religion. But there is one issue that unites people, above all differences – our mutual wish to save the planet. This film encourages us to break all the rules in fashion as long as we remember one thing: to recycle our clothes. To get the message across, we cast interesting people from around the globe who somehow epitomised rule-breaking. Pioneers who could stir an interest through their own underlying story of breaking the conventions or violating norms. The diverse cast of 33 individuals from five continents brought several PR angles that helped the main story. These came from the geographical dispersion, the different subcultural aspects or through the social networks of the cast.

The Brief

To create awareness and engagement around the global Garment Collecting Program we created a film about diversity that aimed to go viral (strong social activation) with the potential to obtain a broad spread in PR, both internationally and on all different platforms.  How well the campaign achieved its goals was followed closely through social media monitoring tools to observe how the message was received on all different markets. We observed two major peaks of engagement, one during the launch of the campaign and the other a month later focusing on one of the diversity questions brought up in the film.

Execution

To generate maximum engagement through a genuine interest – from both ordinary people and journalists – we used a technique that mixes a lot of different topics, trends and influencers, giving us the opportunity to be as relevant as possible.  Therefore, a large part of the PR work was done in the production and strategy – finding the right people to feature in the film as well as the right subjects and conflicts. Each person or topic who was selected had its own potential PR angle or news story.  When launching the film, we used H&M’s own channels and one single press release. Simultaneously, all the participants distributed the film along with behind-the-scenes material, specially made for each media platform, to all their fans and followers. This resulted in the campaign being featured in almost 2 800 news articles around the world and going viral in a truly organic way.

The film alone has had over 10 million views on YouTube and Facebook – and has been featured on nearly 70 television and radio segments, including on news outlets like BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera.  2 800 news articles have been written about the campaign worldwide, for example editorial pieces in The New York Times, The Guardian and Süddeutsche Zeitung. Fashion magazines like Vogue, Elle and Cosmopolitan have also covered the campaign. Overall, the campaign has generated over 1 million organic shares on Facebook and 2 million engagements in social media. 

The Strategy

The strategy was to get our message across with the help of a multitude of influencers with strong social media platforms, making sure that we reached a wide target audience. To stay relevant, we also wanted the film to carry supportive fashion statements and portray subcultures rarely seen in a respectful way. We wanted to create a diverse and inclusive campaign as this is a global message from a global company. The audience is not only H&M consumers from all over the world, but rather anyone who wears clothes, since garments of any brand can be recycled through the H&M Garment Collecting Program. With this strategy, we tapped into real conversations and visualized the change many people wish to see in fashion advertising. We spoke to large groups of people and – through their massive engagement – raised awareness of the fact that sustainability is a natural part of fashion.