Seeing a gap in its retail merchandising between the Super Bowl and Easter, Kraft Foods wanted a program that created maximum impact in-store across its entire portfolio of brands during the early spring period. It leveraged its alliance with the NCAA to activate the “Munch Madness!” campaign, which was conducted during the NCAA’s men’s basketball tournament.
The fully integrated program proved to be as big a winner as the 2003 tournament champion, Syracuse. Not only did it encompass 35 Kraft brands and 13 divisions, but the campaign extended to retail partners, NCAA venues, the Internet and television advertising.
When the score was tallied, Munch Madness! was as valuable to Kraft as MVP Carmelo Anthony was to Syracuse. The NCAA promotion was Kraft’s most successful multi-brand promotion of 2003, exceeding its objectives of driving incremental feature and display and realizing incremental volume growth versus the previous year.
“We were able to leverage our relationship with the NCAA on many different levels — in brands, through support ads — and we hit the consumers in many different ways,” says Michael Giardina, EastWest Creative account executive who oversaw the promotion for Kraft. “It truly was a fully-integrated campaign. We hit on all cylinders.”
Munch Madness! Got support on all national P-O-P and in-store executions during the promotion, which Giardana says helped to strongly link Kraft to the NCAA tournament. New York City-based EastWest focused on products associated with watching the games on television, and leveraged key volume brands for that period.
Participating Kraft brands were supported by television, print and online ads, as well as live sampling and on-pack mediums. The kraftfoods.com Web site hosted game-day snacking and recipe ideas, activities and interactive games, Kraft-branded ads and banners and sampling created awareness at NCAA venues.
At the in-store level, take-one tearpads with game-time recipe ideas and a bundled offer for free Planters peanuts with the purchase of any three Kraft products helped to drive purchases.
Planters also ran an in-store sweeps that offered tickets to the 2004 Men’s Final Four, an on-line contest to find the Division I school with the “Nuttiest fans,” and an online virtual scratch-and-win game for instant prizes that included courtside seats to the 2003 Men’s Final Four.
Kraft’s DiGiorno frozen pizza brand also ran an on-pack promotion that delivered game pieces with one of 1,500 NCAA school names; more than 70,000 prizes were awarded based on how a given team did in the NCAA tournament. The consumer with the game piece depicting eventual national champion Syracuse won a trip to the 2004 Final Four.
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