When it comes to making pancakes, Latino moms begin from scratch: milk, eggs and flour.

So when Quaker Oats targeted Hispanics for its Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, it had to prove that the quickly prepared variety could be just as tasty as homemade.

The solution was to hire real-life Mexican women who would get together at events with other Latino moms and their kids to cook a panqueque breakfast using the mix.

Experiential campaigns that require one-on-one contact with consumers for lengthy periods of time necessitate recruiting a special kind of brand rep. Someone who can articulate the nuances of complicated products and services — much more than a pretty face with a car-show smile and the ability to blurt out pithy platitudes.

In Aunt Jemima’s case, the supplemental help had to speak fluent Spanish and live the Hispanic life. They were trained by Quaker Oats to be chefs and comply with various state food safety and sanitation laws. They had to be able to set up and tear down cooking stations. And they had to be very comfortable working in close contact with people.

“The key difference between hiring for intimate versus mass events is that you obviously need more specialized staff,” says Paul Stringer, executive vice president of Aspen Latino, a marketing services agency, which handled the campaign. “More critical information is being exchanged. They have to deliver a key message and often acquire some information. The staff is expected to engage in a Q&A and potentially make a sale.”

So how did Aspen Latino find these moms?

Like most event marketing agencies, Aspen maintains a robust database of individuals game for street-team work. But in this case, it also placed ads in Spanish-language publications in Los Angeles and Chicago, where the events took place this winter. The company also sought recruits hailing from the same region of Mexico as the shoppers targeted by Quaker Oats.

Sixteen women in all were hired.

ON STAGE

Movie promotions require a different kind of skill set.

Last summer prior to the opening of Disney Pixar Animation Studios film “Ratatouille,” the Becker Group sought an actress who could portray a pastry chef, as depicted in the kid’s film, during a cross-country, stage-show journey called the Big Cheese Tour.

Auditions were conducted in Los Angeles and Orlando. This performer would be onstage for lengthy periods of time cooking and working crowds filled with families with young children. The tour made stops at food festivals across the country.

Becker needed to cast four other parts for the show, and sought candidates through an internal talent database and personnel agencies, as well as advertisements in trade magazines. The auditions were videotaped and some of the people hired were flown to Pixar’s studios to attend a one-day version of its animation school.

“Even though this isn’t a starring role in a feature film, it’s a starring role representing a major brand,” says Eddie Newquist, creative studio president for the Becker Group.

The lead role went to an actress who also happened to be a French pastry chef well acquainted with the recipes. Her other talents include juggling and the ability to breathe fire, skills both sure to help when entertaining children.

“We invested in making sure those people were right from A to Z so in the end that’s what the consumers would remember,” Newquist says. “If there are personal connections happening, those people have to be right. If they don’t represent brand assets we just know it’s not going to work no matter how attractive or good they are as actors.”

Kimberly-Clark used casting agencies to find “good listeners” for its well-known Let it Out campaign for Kleenex. Couches were placed around the country on city streets where actors listened as people stopped to express themselves, and if necessary, pulled a Kleenex tissue from a nearby box to blot their eyes.

The requirements for the role: warm, empathetic, approachable, not-too-serious, a sense of humor, gently probing and visibly flawed, but not in an off-putting way.

“The listener had to be able to extract people’s feelings and emotions without having a judgment,” says Matt Crum, marketing director for Kleenex brand North Atlantic development.

The promotion ran not only in the U.S., but also in the U.K., Switzerland, Ireland, Belgium and Denmark among other European countries. And it just debuted last month in Canada.

“It’s relative to a typical casting in a TV spot,” Crums says. “But there’s more homework upfront in taking the time to put these people into the role. It’s a non-scripted environment with a wide range of emotions and it needs to be nimble.”

INTENSE TRAINING

Once reps are hired for specialized events, the training is intense.

Last month, Hasbro ran one-day events in more than 2,000 Wal-Marts to show off its 2008 lineup of the highly collectible Littlest Pet Shop pets.

Each of the 4,000 ambassadors received a booklet with details about Hasbro, the pets and related products, as well as an overall description of the campaign.

“We had to get these people up to speed, as if they were a Hasbro employee,” says Jay Zemke, vice president of strategic development for Bard Advertising, which developed and executed the campaign.

Once the hires received the packets, they were directed online to learn more about each segment outlined in the booklet. When they were up to speed, they had to prove it. Each rep called a specific phone number to answer questions to make sure they understood everything they needed to know. If all the questions were answered correctly they received a pin code to activate a $20 Visa card they could use to buy items they might need if, say, a standee came apart and they needed some duct tape.

The temp staff also had to learn specifics about the pets, such as the new VIP, or virtual interactive pets, that come with a code on its collar and can interact with the same pet online, Zemke says.

Two reps worked most stores, but a third was needed at 100 of the Wal-Marts to staff a photo station where families could get their pictures taken against a photo backdrop of the pets and later claim it online. Those reps required additional training for how to operate the cameras.

“Every new pet is on the shelf,” says David Henderson, director of customer strategic marketing for Hasbro Inc. “At the end of the day our goal was to show the families everything that is new with Littlest Pet Shop.”

Finding the right person for personalized experiential campaigns can be time consuming, but well worth it, experts say. “They are the face, the execution, the fulfillment of all the brand is trying to put out there.” says Ira Jaffe, vice president of EventNetUSA.

THE SEARCH

1. Mine the in-house database for a match to the job’s skill set
2. Send an e-mail blast to advertise the job to appropriate segments of the database
3. Place in-market ads
4. Post ads on job boards
5. Network online
6. Contact a staffing or casting agency

For more articles on experiential marketing, go to http://promomagazine.com/eventmarketing/

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.

A Map, from Experience

• Most overused locale: Times Square (“NASCAR on steroids”)

• Most underrated locale: Staten Island Ferry Terminal; airports; private locations that issue permits through a property management company (instead of City Hall); Mall of America (“fabulous venue with a great variety of people; it’s just tough to convince clients that Minnesota is a melting pot”)

• Toughest city for permits: New York; Miami; Boston

• Most congenial city to marketers: Denver; Boise; Columbus; Atlanta

• Most expensive city: New York (“ugh”)

• Least expensive: Anything outside the top 15 DMAs (“250 million people live there”)

• City with the best audiences: Los Angeles (“for variety”); New York (“for crowd size”); Austin, TX; New Orleans; the Midwest (“typically friendlier and appreciate free stuff!”)

• Most jaded audiences: New York (“the ultimate litmus test”); Los Angeles; both coasts (“they’re tired of being approached, wary of fraud, and always in a hurry”)

• Strictest unions: Chicago; Philadelphia

• Toughest cops: New York (“but they’ve seen more and can make more experienced judgments. Police in smaller cities aren’t as flexible”); Chicago “Police inherently try to help if you are polite and respectful.”

• Best local press: Austin, TX (“especially for music events”); Nashville; smaller markets (“give them a local angle or hit them on a slow news day”).

Source: An informal poll of a half-dozen promo agency executives