At Your Service: Mentos Assigns Summer Intern to Market Fun

(Promo) Call it "Subservient Intern."

Mentos maker Perfetti Van Melle USA has put its summer intern, Trevor, at the center of an online campaign reminiscent of Burger King's landmark Subservient Chicken.

Trevor, a 19-year-old student from the University of Cincinnati, gets his own Web site and phone line this summer to entertain Mentos fans. Consumers visit MentosIntern.com to watch Trevor work via Webcam. (When we logged on last week after 5 p.m., the lens was trained on a fishtank. The next morning, he was improvising a love poem.)

They can also call or e-mail him at Perfetti van Melle headquarters and ask for help with a wide range of tasks: Proof your resume, play a video game with you, call your mom to say you love her.

The campaign began yesterday and runs through August, supporting Mentos' brand positioning as "the funmaker."

The candy company has a range of social networking options in place to support Trevor's mission, including pages on MySpace and Facebook, a blog, a live chat and a link to play Xbox Live against the intern.

"Every college guy wants this internship. I can't imagine what kind of jobs people are going to ask me to do but I'm up for being the, well, Mentos funmaker," Trevor said in a statement.

Last summer, Mentos piggybacked a pop culture fad when it staged its Mentos Geyser video contest on YouTube (Promo Xtra, Aug. 3, 2006). Consumers were posting their own videos of geysers, the explosive bubbling that shoots out of a two-liter soft drink bottle when a Mentos mint is dropped in. Perfetti van Melle capitalized on the craze by staging its own contest. Launch Creative Marketing handled that campaign.