Mentos Campaign Proves the Value of Consumer Generated Branding

It’s becoming more commonplace to see campaigns that leverage the strength of the consumer’s viewpoint and deliver a spectacular product from a grassroots view. Mentos is among those that has succeeded in this realm.

Yonge-Dundas Square on August 13 was a scene of fun in the sun, with giant slides, gladiator challenges, and hilarious Sumo wrestling competitions. This was an adult fun park, conceived by Toronto resident, Danielle Lamarche, winner of the 2009 Mentos Campaign, “Make your World Go Rounder“.

Cossette was the agency responsible for this campaign. The premise: Make Your World Go Rounder was meant to be light-hearted and fun, and make Canadians smile by reminding them about life’s simple pleasures. According to Alison Neil of Cossette, “In the competitive and cluttered gum market we wanted to bring attention to a product feature of Mentos Gum, their roundness (the only round gum on the market), hence “make your world go rounder… we certainly consider this campaign to be non-traditional. We decided to develop an experiential/User Generated Content campaign to engage consumers, develop a dialogue with them and enhance their brand experience.”

Danielle Lamarche, who received a cash prize of $5000 summed up the day this way: “The event was extremely well received. An unbelievable amount of people came to the fun park. It was so well set up and had blow up games that even adults loved to participate in. It was steady all day and fairly long lines actually began to form after 6pm.”

Lamarche’s winning response : “Put up an Adult Fun Park in Dundas Square with blow up slides and more. We all want to be kids again!” Says Lamarche, “I really wanted to give a suggestion that would be something adults could do to let loose. I knew that it also had to the affordable and executable. It also needed to be an idea that could be Mentos Gum branded. I always watch out of the corner of my eye when kids play on the blow up toys these days and wish I was still able to do it as well. I’m sure many other adults feel that way so why not give them a chance to do it for a day?”

What does she think of the Mentos brand now? She sees a brand that tries to encourage positive thinking. “A lot of the responses that I saw were about giving to others, donations to charity, and making a mass audience happy. … People want to be happy and want to see the world become a better place. We’ve come to a time now where people are becoming much more aware of what is going on in the world and I think it’s important for brands to be aware and responsive to it.”

The campaign focus was the website: (www.makeyourworldgorounder.ca and www.pourquevotremondetourneplusrond.ca) but was heavily supported by out of home, transit, radio and web advertising. The latter also included social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to support the contest, communicate the new line of products, begin developing brand loyalty, and help with Mentos Gum SEO.

The response to the contest was overwhelming. Close to 20,000 idea submissions in Canada were received.
According to Neill, “We feel that we’ve accomplished our goals of increasing brand awareness and communicating that Mentos Gum is a great, fun product that is close to consumers.”

In using consumer generated content to help fuel conversation, Neill agrees that UGC (User-generated content) works. Says Neill, especially ” when you listen to your consumers, participate in the dialogue and give back to them. We are big believers in experiential marketing at Cossette.”

I love my Moo

What do you get relatives for Christmas who have spent many years accumulating everything under the sun? Who want for nothing in particular? And who don’t fancy any of the new electronic gadgets or games that technology offers?

I stopped guessing and realized that what most grandparents (I am assuming ages 65+) want is time in a bottle: the luxury of capturing precious moments and recording them and keeping them forever. We have the luxury of having a close family so we spend a lot of time together. But there are so many recorded moments, but not enough picture frames, and little time to print and stuff them all in photo albums.

So this year I decided on something different: I have always loved Moo and their unique concept in business cards. They’ve always been a conversation piece when I’ve distributed mine, and consequently, I’ve been able to create Moo-converts in the process. So, when the Mosaic frame came out, I went to town and started going through all my digital photos and picking out the perfect pictures to fill up the frame.  The grandparents just loved it because it captures all the important events that happened this year — all in one frame.

I saw a bunch of other ways people have used these Moo cards.  Here’s another one I love: It’s from LUZIEyear. Just fab. Thanks Moo!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

The Secrets behind many Viral Videos….the anti-Christ within the Social Web

I have seen many attempts to produce a formula for viral video to drive sales. A lot of the rules are similar but one would argue that “viral” is the result of the effort as opposed to the strategy. Anyone intending on creating viral video can absolutely expect to witness incremental growth in traffic or sales if done right but it can come at a cost. The video below summarizes one of those strategies from The Comotion Group.

I have had the pleasure of working with Dan Ackerman-Greenberg, founder of The Comotion Group. This was the infamous post that was featured in techcrunch titled “The Secret Strategies Behind Many Viral Videos” and the immense controversy it drew. The tactics used by Dan and Matt to successfully get videos to the number 1 position involved using staff to create comments to draw attention to the post and seeding the video in networks, and even faking headlines. Hmm…sounds like something any company would do to drive sales.

In the world of social networking, Rule No. 1 talks about authenticity ie being real. Authenticity has always been a difficult position to maintain where marketing is concerned. Let’s face it — you are selling a product. You have limited time and limited budget. To build authenticity follows a set of new rules. You need TIME — time to build a network…time to build credibility….time to build a legitimate following….Only then can you even hope to drive that traffic or start evangelizing your products. It’s not within the realm of possibility when you have to meet quarter-end goals. Dan has a proven formula that works. If you look at his website, it’s merely a webform. Both Dan and Matt have had such huge success as a result of the article they haven’t had time to even create a website. Yes, it’s controversial…but it can be a potential short-term gain for those who don’t have the luxury of time. The consequences can also be enormous. So…proceed with caution.

The emergence of this new medium….

I’ve responded to a number of blog posts “Overlay.tv Adds Links and Easter Eggs to Music Videos” and “Hypervideo: Hyperlinking video content” and there is a lot of positive stuff being written about companies such as ours. Interactive video is here but it’s taking some time to sink into mainstream.  It’s ironic:  iTV has been talked about for years –> it was supposed to have emerged by now….yet online video is still a medium we haven’t figured out.  We’re still too far off that iTV phenomenon given that the online video market is still in a state of fragmentation and testing. Everyone’s still trying to figure out the monetization angle. There are still no standard CPMs for video advertising. Formats are continuously morphing in response to the user and advertising views on mitigating annoyance and increasing performance.  The video player is non-standard and the recent partnerships like FOX networks and utarget; Brightcove and Bebo; and AOL and ESPN  are results of attempts to spread the net as wide as possible to maximize audience reach. Performance is also another topic that needs addressing. TV has always been a branding medium –>product placement has been the only in-content-type-advertising that is both costly and doesn’t necessarily translate into revenue or traffic. Video has the ability to solve for this given its emergence from the online world, which records tonnes of data on user behaviour and determines likely user propensities. Google has already started this process and is moving quickly to figure this out when the digital home environment comes to fruition.

Most importantly, before all this settles the public has to become comfortable with the notion of video interactivity and the plethora of possibilities from exploring new ways of publishing to new models of revenue generation. The music industry can definitely benefit by creating new engagement possibilities for their artists. It’s a matter of time…hopefully just around the corner…

Hypervideo, IPTV…the holy grail of online video

This is shameless promotion since I am employed by Overlay.TV but I truly believe that this company has the holy grail to the next generation of online video. Having worked at a huge established portal, I understood all too well the challenges with monetizing video. Youtube is still testing the waters on this one. Yahoo! was still using pre-roll video and companion ads alongside of video and commanding high CPM rates that avertisers weren’t buying. What’s more: the monetization of video was limited only to the premium content on Music and News. The video channel itself ironically included only banner options. In all these cases, performance was poor for the most part because the ads were annoying and advertisers attempted to infer relevance to the video content where there was none.

Overlay.TV does a few things: It allows the user to create this relevance by empowering them to be the advertiser. The video also doesn’t have to be premium content but ANY content found on video-sharing sites. Now it’s super easy to be a publisher and add value to any video. On the consumption side, the user has the option to turn off the overlays and watch the video in its original form. Have a look at what I’m talking about: Here’s one I created of IJustine and American Eagle.

from www.overlay.tv posted with vodpod