Dawn Brings Its Legacy to Life With Ducklings Device

The genesis of the new Dawn dish soap ad goes back five decades, when the founder of bird charity International Bird Rescue made an important discovery. Faced with stricken birds following oil spills and other polluting incidents, she found that the most effective remedy was a gentle wash with a solution of Dawn soap.

This discovery didn’t just help the unfortunate birds and the charity coming to their aid. It proved a gift to Dawn’s marketers too, who have promoted their brand ever since using the connection. If it’s gentle and effective enough to clean the feathers of seabirds, Dawn is also likely to do a great job on your dishes – without leaving your hands feeling dry.

This creative platform has helped Dawn become America’s market leading brand of dish soap, and they’re now taking another step, bringing the connection between Dawn and birds to life with a pair of new mascots. The two talking ducklings who star in the new Dawn ad aren’t doing much in the commercial – in fact they’re just telling us about the product and letting us see it in action. But the long-standing link between Dawn and wildlife is strong enough that they don’t have to play a dramatic role; their presence is enough to reinforce existing positive brand associations.

Also, the animated ducklings are plain adorable, which is how a very straightforward product demonstration ad manages to score an impressive 4.2-Stars on the Test Your Ad platform. That’s a score predicting strong long-term share gain with the right level of investment, and well ahead of the sector average (only 2.6-Stars).

The ad performs even better as a driver of short-term sales, with an Exceptional Spike Rating (or predictor of sales boosts), again way above the category average. And the ducklings also get an above-average Brand Fluency score.

The two ducklings have the potential to work as what we call a character Fluent Device. That’s to say, they could easily become long-term mascots, driving recognition and emotional effectiveness in ad after ad if Dawn chooses to keep on featuring them. Fluent Devices can be a truly impactful addition to a creative platform, as they’re a source of creative consistency. That allows campaigns and platforms to tap into what our recent report calls Compound Creativity, creative effectiveness that keeps building and growing a business over time.

Will the ducklings stick around? These Test Your Ad results are an extremely encouraging debut for the characters, and Dawn already has a long-term association with birds that it can tap into and work with. Nothing’s certain in advertising, but you could easily be seeing these ducklings cleaning up for Dawn for years to come.