(Promo) If you missed some stunt that a marketer pulled on the street today,
don't worry. Chances are it'll end up on TV-and not necessarily on the
evening news.
Call
it reality marketing or street-to-screen marketing. But brands are
bringing their events to the screen through ads and programming in
30-second and 60-minute increments.
Take
Proctor & Gamble. The firm co-hosted the first Bunco World Tour
Championship for its Prilosec OTC heartburn medicine last month, and
featured it in a one-hour special on the Oxygen cable network. And it
is now hosting bunco parties across the country.
The target audience? Roughly 17 million middle-aged suburban women who are behind the resurgence of the decades-old dice game.
In
a similar vein, cable network GSN will hold its National Vocabulary
Championship finals in New York City this month, then feature the event
on April 15 in a one-hour show.
Then
there's Kleenex. The tissue brand set up a couch on street corners in
four cities and invited passers-by to have a chat with a congenial Good
Listener. The best bits — a teary moment, an earth-shaking sneeze —
were used in TV ads, the theme of which, “Let it Out,” positions
Kleenex as part of emotional moments. The couch — and a video crew —
are now on their way to 12 more cities.
The
idea of repackaging a promotion into TV content isn't new. Unilever
pioneered the strategy in 2002 with its “Axe House Party,” a shindig in
a Miami mansion. Attended by 100 contest winners, the event was filmed
for a one-hour program on cable network TNN.
But
these on-air replays are now more commonplace. For one thing, they
allow a brand to capture a street campaign (ideally, impromptu
endorsements from real people) and bring it to a broader audience. The
result is more controllable than that of a PR pickup, and further blurs
the line between marketing and entertainment.
Beyond
that, there are two advantages. First, of course, is that the brand can
get more bang for its buck. A $100,000 street event provides ready-made
footage, amortizing the cost to reach a wider audience. And a promo
that ends up on-air can pull additional funding from ad and even
content-production budgets.
For
example, GSN pooled marketing, programming and sponsorship dollars for
its National Vocabulary Challenge, the finals of which sponsors
Sharpie, Sony Credit Card, Neutrogena, Orbitz and American Heritage
covered about half the costs.
And
now the network is signing more sponsors for fall, and eventually hopes
to fund the full event through sponsorship fees, says Joel Chiodi,
GSN's vice president of marketing.
GSN's
campaign is in many ways a casebook study of how to proceed. To do it,
the network dropped a two-year-old mall tour. Then it teamed up with The Princeton Review
to create the contest. Schools registered to get test materials created
by the publication, and students were tested on it by their teachers.
Next?
The 100 kids who scored highest in each city competed in a local game
show-style competition hosted by GSN star Dylan Lane, and produced by American Idol producer Andy Scheer. The finalists will travel to New York this month to compete for a $40,000 scholarship.
Another 30,000 kids who live outside the tour cities took the test online at www.WinWithWords.com. Of those, 3,000 competed in regional finals in 75 sites.
Who else wins from this? The cable affiliates in the tour cities. They get video-on-demand programming, showcasing local kids.
“We're
a standalone network, so we have to give affiliates great programs that
make them look good to their local community,” Chiodi says. “That helps
us negotiate strong channel position” against bigger media companies
with multiple networks.
P&G,
meanwhile, realized that it could reach Prilosec OTC's core user,
middle-aged women, at bunco parties, where the snacks are as big a draw
as the dice. So it licensed the World Bunco Association's trademarks
through 2008.
The
2006 tournament contenders, all 1,000 of them, played on tables covered
with Prilosec-purple tablecloths, and used cups and napkins bearing the
brand name.
Why bunco? Research showed that 20% of all frequent heartburn sufferers are interested in bunco.
The
second annual World Bunco Championship will occur later this month, the
finale to Prilosec OTC's own “Bunco World Tour,” a series of four
regional tournaments held over the last two months in Kansas City, San
Antonio, Atlantic City and Nashville. Four regional finalists and two
additional players chosen by wildcard drawings won trips to the finals.
Roughly
1,200 women registered to compete at the events. And those free seats
were filled within 12 hours, with another 1,000 people on the waiting
list. The top prize is $50,000.
This
isn't only about bunco. P&G will have a pharmacist on site to
answer questions about heartburn and give away Prilosec OTC samples.
And another P&G brand, Folgers, will hand out samples of Simply
Smooth, a beverage created for easy digestion. P&G works with
several agencies to execute the tour, including Jack Morton Worldwide.
Some
reality marketing efforts play off real news events. For example, HP
sent a van outfitted with scanners and printers to New Orleans after
Katrina struck, inviting residents to bring family photos damaged by
the storm. The computer marketer's team restored 300 photos, then hung
them in a makeshift gallery for families to view before taking them
home.
The project was featured in ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition series, in an episode titled “After The Storm.”
Emotional moments And Kleenex? It has filmed consumer interactions to use in ads to drive more engagement.
The
first Good Listener spots were filmed with street-corner couches in New
York, New Orleans, San Francisco and London. And when they broke in
January, they prompted a flood of calls.
“People
wanted to know if the Good Listener is a real guy, and if they could
sit on the couch,” says Dave Brotherton, associate brand manager,
Kleenex translation.
They
can this month, when Kimberly Clark begins its 12-city tour. The Good
Listener (played by a character actor who once was a social worker)
will chat with consumers. And brand reps will pass out cards with a
thought-provoking question that visitors can answer on the spot.
GMR Marketing, which handles the tour, will film the sessions for use on a new Web site, www.LetItOut.com, and main agency JWT may use them for future TV spots.
“When
they were filming the ads, people's stories were so powerful,” says
Amanda Boyle, vice president and group account director at GMR. “We
wanted to be sure we could capture them at the events, too.”
JWT
still has “an embarrassment of riches” from its earlier shoots, says
JWT creative director Richie Glickman. “People are just starting to see
the tip of it. But it's important to have timely online content [from
the tour] that we can also use for ads on other sites.”
Having
the same Good Listener on-air and on tour gives continuity, Glickman
adds: “Having the same person from the TV spots gives a nice bigness to
the events.” The ad-and-event campaign marks a strategy shift after
seven years with the tagline “Thank goodness for Kleenex.”
“We
wanted to make the brand's role more active in people's lives,” says
Matt Crum, Kleenex brand development director. “We wanted more of a
two-way dialogue.
You
can't rely on just a TV spot when you're asking people to talk about
emotions that make them cry. “The idea demands personal interaction at
some point,” Crum says. “The kind of authentic comments that people
make on the couch — we couldn't reproduce that in a studio.”
Kleenex
will be in Los Angeles, the city with the biggest school district, in
time for back-to-school, the brand's second-biggest season (behind
cold/flu season). Kids and teachers will tell how they feel about
school; video clips will run on the Web site.
This
is Kimberly-Clark's first experiential push for Kleenex, as the brand
shifts money from mass media to more targeted vehicles.
The
first TV spots affected “only the few dozen people who sat on the
couch,” Crum says. “Building it out with other ways for people to
participate [gives us] a happy medium with a big-splash event and the
broader reach of the ads.”
Sometimes
content ends up on a DVD. Warner Bros. Consumer Products is pitching
Speedy Gonzalez to skateboarders with a six-week tour starring pros
Danny Gonzalez, Patrick Melcher and Steve Caballero.
At
each tour stop, crews film the performance for a DVD that eventually
will sell in skateboard shops alongside Speedy apparel. Local kids get
to skate with the stars, too; tour producers will pick one kid in each
market to include in the DVD.
Talk
about bragging rights. (Those kids each get a copy of the DVD, gratis.)
Grand Central Marketing, New York handles the tour. Intersection, Los
Angeles, produces the DVD.
“The
skater community has a tradition of DVDs of top skaters' best tricks,
sold at parks and shops,” says Grand Central CEO Matthew Glass. “That
lends authenticity to what we're doing.”
The three skaters shoot their own footage on the road between stops. That feeds a dedicated Web site, www.AndalePosse.com,
and 10 other sites that get new video and blog updates three times a
week. “We expect to reach more people online than via DVDs,” Glass
says. But the DVDs build Warner Brothers' presence in stores, and
cement a long-term link to the sport.
Web coverage is standard these days for tours and experiential campaigns. Meow Mix borrowed from MTV's Real World and CBS' Survivor
last summer for Meow Mix House. A Manhattan storefront housed Meow Mix
House, where a passel of cats lived in full view of passers-by.
Three-minute
segments aired on Animal Planet for 10 weeks, asking viewers to vote
one cat out of the house each week. (Those cats were adopted.) A
24-hour Webcam drew 2.5 million visitors to a dedicated Web site, far
more than Animal Planet's viewership, Glass says.
Web coverage of tours and events is standard stuff these days. The TV tie-in? There's a trend that's worth watching.
Double takes Kleenex
tested its couch concept, “Let it Out,” for a few days in New York last
spring. “We put a couch out to see if people would actually sit and
play with the idea,” says Richie Glickman, creative director at JWT.
“Part of the charm is that people will share in the midst of the chaos
of a busy street.”
Of course, participants signed release forms for JWT to use their likeness in ads.
That's
a trickier task on shoots for “truth” ads, the anti-tobacco campaign
that stages alarming demonstrations to illustrate the damage done by
tobacco. A cowboy rides into Manhattan, then sings around a campfire —
through the tracheotomy hole in his throat. Ten half-naked men get
their backs shaved with the chemical that's in hair remover — and
cigarettes. It's the unvarnished reaction of passers-by that drive the
message home.
While
“truth” agencies Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and Arnold Worldwide shoot
the spots live, production assistants scan the crowd to see who reacts,
then asks those pedestrians to sign a release form to appear in the
spot. “It's a lot of work to run around and get people to sign the
forms,” says Trish O'Callaghan, a spokesperson for the American Legacy
Foundation, which runs the “truth” campaign.
