A Brain Bangers Ball
Leave it to The Phelps Group, Santa Monica, CA, to create a winning promo that teamed Roland Corp., a professionally acclaimed maker of digital pianos, keyboards, and synthesizers, with Fox Network’s phenomenally popular sci-fi hit, The X-Files. Roland has a gadget called the PMA-5 Personal Music Assistant that allows the musically challenged to metamorphose into Mozarts by punching in numbers. What the low-consumer-budget Roland needed was a high-profile cross-promoter to plug into.
It sounds more like Mission Impossible than sci-fi, but for a company whose growing client list includes such disparate ventures as Air Tahiti Nui, Bushnell Sports Optics, and Panasonic Pro Audio, nothing is too tricky to tackle.
Phelps vp Joe Hartnett connected with Fox when it released a three-pack of X-Files episodes for home video. A firm believer in the direct approach, Hartnett went to Mimi Slavin of Fox Home Video Entertainment in Los Angeles, and they met with X-Files producer Chris Carter. Carter has an intense interest in music and liked the PMA-5.
After four months of development, Hartnett had linked the Roland product and X-Files Web sites for The Operation X2 Trivia Contest, which offered consumers a chance to win the PMA-5 or The X-Files video cassettes. Contestants who could correctly punch in the notes of The X-Files theme song were entered to win.
At the height of the promo, visits to Roland’s Web site more than doubled, and Fox received more than 15,000 online entries to win a PMA-5. Traffic to The X-Files Web site doubled as well. Supporting direct mail was sent to 700,000 addresses via the Fox Home Entertainment newsletter, and another 400,000 read about it in Roland’s magazine, R.U.C.
Energetic? Imaginative? What would you expect from a company of 54 employees who get their creative juices flowing with things like The Brain Bangers Ball, a weekly lunch/brainstorming session devoted to client issues. There is also The Wall, where all work in progress is publicly displayed in the conceptual stage, story board stage, and full execution stage for constructive comment from one and all. There is also The Eyeball, where staffers like chief creative officer Howie Cohen air their views and ideas and invite feedback.
Phelps’s latest accomplishment is a just-signed multi-year marketing agreement with San Diego-based Petco. The retailer had a fairly large loyalty program called PALS (Pet Animal Lovers Save) which targets upscale, pet-pampering women aged 25 to 54. Phelps handled the direct component for the program and did TV spots (from the pet’s point of view), each containing hard-hitting, added-value offers to drive store traffic.
Petco asked Phelps to come up with a promo that would enhance membership. “We unleashed the floodgates of new and exciting ideas,” says Petco vp-marketing Bruce Jesse. Among them were partnerships with hotels and airlines to offer travel discounts along with the more obvious tie-ins with kennels, obedience schools, and pet parks. The campaign should roll out mid-summer.
“It’s a natural evolution for the PALS program,” says Jesse, who praises the energy and driving passion of the Phelps staff. “They always help me broaden my perspective of what can be done.”
Hartnett has his eyes planted firmly on the promotional potential of the Web. The agency is currently doing a complete update of The X-Files Web site and is urging Petco to be more Web-active.
“Online promotion is going to explode in the next two to three years as it becomes clear banner advertising isn’t satisfying expectations,” he says.
When the explosion comes, Phelps will probably have done a lot to put the match to the powder.
Phelp’s mouth is watering over the Tahiti Fod Festival program, which sends Food Network celebrity chefs to paradise in 2000.
