Kickin’ It
Battle Creek, MI-based Kellogg USA is kicking support of its Frosted Flakes brand up a notch with a tie to Major League Soccer that began late last month.
Two million special-edition 25-ounce boxes of the sugary cereal hit shelves after the MLS championship game ran its course on Oct. 15. Package fronts boast action shots of players from the winning team along with Tony the Tiger holding up the championship Alan I. Rothenberg trophy. The backs of boxes feature a team picture, and a letter from league commissioner Don Garber runs on side panels.
Kellogg’s has been sponsoring athletic programs since the 1920s. The company is currently developing another effort set to break in the next few months tied to recent U.S. Olympic gold-medal winners.
Kellogg’s and MLS have worked together before. In 1996, the soccer league’s debut year, players were featured on boxes of Corn Pops, Raisin Bran, and Frosted Flakes. The promotion was successful enough that Kellogg’s stepped up its sponsorship activation in 1998 by creating the annual Kellogg’s Bowl national youth soccer tournament for kids under 14.
Plano, TX-based Frito-Lay’s Tostitos brand is well into the football mindset. The company is running an Ultimate Tailgate Cook-Off recipe contest awarding one winner a tailgate party package. Shoppers mail in recipes that must include a Tostitos product and descriptions of how they like to tailgate. Entries will be whittled down to 20 to be posted on tostitos.com this month. Three finalists will be flown to Phoenix in late December for five-day trips that include tickets to the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl and a cook-off judged by Food TV celebrity chef Bobby Flay. The winner scores a tailgate pack featuring a grill, cooler, barbecue utensils, chips-and-dip bowl, and a year’s supply of Tostitos.
Apple & Eve, Roslyn, NY, is teaming with Random House Children’s Books to donate 25,000 tomes to First Book, a nonprofit organization that provides books to low-income families. To celebrate the juice maker’s 25th anniversary and support a Sesame Street product line that rolled out in May, an on-pack self-liquidating offer gives one of four Sesame Street books to shoppers for $4 and two proofs of purchase. The offer runs through December.
Sony Pictures Family Entertainment, Culver City, CA, has recruited several partners to support the second season of its CGI-animated kids’ show, Max Steel. Pizza Hut will run an extreme sports-themed premium effort in November and December. The seven-week promotion will offer four toys based on the show. Next spring, Max will partner with Carl’s Jr./Hardee’s for a campaign in 3,100 quick-service restaurants. Starting in February, that five-week effort will feature P-O-P and online ads as well as premiums. Lastly, the May sweeps season will find Max Steel featured in a premium promotion at more than 1,600 Jack-in-the-Box restaurants.
Warner Lambert’s Listerine, Helene Curtis’s Salon Selectives, and Hyundai are piggybacking the iCAST College Comedy Tour, a 25-campus mobile effort hyping the New York City-based entertainment portal’s entry into the college market.
The six-week tour, which is searching for the “funniest college student in America,” kicked off Oct. 3 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Students compete in live joke-telling, stand-up, and sketches at evening events or enter submissions at icast.com. Comedian Andy Dick hosted the opening show at Amherst, where he was joined by Ralph Harris, winner of the “Clean Up Your Mouth” award presented by Cool Mint Listerine PocketPacks (the brand’s latest extension) at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival earlier this year.
Listerine will sample PocketPacks, while Hyundai showcases its new Santa Fe sports utility vehicle with virtual test drives. Each student who takes a test drive will be entered to win a Santa Fe. Salon Selectives will execute a “Hairlarious Highlights” sweepstakes in which students share their funniest “Bad Hair Day” stories on video. The best stories from each college campus will be posted at www.comedy.icast/salonselectives.com, with the funniest earning a trip to New York City.
Black Entertainment Television (BET), Washington, DC, is wrapping up a Road Runner tour of 37 black colleges and universities. Two partners, The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation’s Black Youth Vote and Education and Rap The Vote, traveled with the cable network in a bid to boost voter registration. The effort’s goal was to register more than 10,000 voters while generating awareness for BET. Students who registered or signed a voting card received a special sticker enabling them to enter a You’re A Star contest, which put them on stage to perform music, dance, poetry, or comedy routines. Contestants were videotaped, with the best footage to be aired during BET’s special “You’re the Star … 15 Seconds of Fame” week.
Campbell Soup Co., Camden, NJ, added an on-pack sweeps to its 27-year-old Labels for Education program. Labels now carry instant-win gamepieces offering 10 grand-prize winners $10,000 (for the consumer) and one million bonus labels (for his/her school). First-prize winners (25 in all) get two Hewlett-Packard computers, one for home and one for school; second prize is free Campbell’s products (home) and 100 bonus labels (school). The company says 80,000-plus schools and education groups participate in Labels for Education.
Dutch grocery giant Royal Ahold last month hosted a two-week global promotion across 6,000 supermarkets in 23 countries. The Best In Your Home campaign was executed in 13 languages and featured themed discounts on food and merchandise. In the U.S., the promotion ran in 1,110 Stop & Shop, Giant Food, BI-LO, and Tops stores. The campaign invaded Albert Jeijn and ICA stores in Europe, Disco, La Fragua, and Santa Isabel stores in South America, and TOPS outlets in Asia. In addition to price discounts and special merchandise offers, customers also entered country-specific sweepstakes. In the U.S., for example, shoppers won cruises. In Guatemala, a house was given away each day of the campaign.
Universal Studios, Universal City, CA, enlisted America Online, Dulles, VA, to help support the launch of new DVD releases of Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park: The Lost World. AOL is promoting the titles in various ways: a Jurassic Park online greeting card offer from American Greetings on AOL Moviefone; a Webcast featuring chats with the cast from the set of the in-production Jurassic Park III available through a link on the DVD; and a sweepstakes overlay giving away a Panasonic home theater system, a Universal Home Video/DVD library, and a grand-prize trip for two to Universal Studios in Los Angeles and a Park III set visit.
Morris Plains, NJ-based Adams USA’s Bubblicious is complementing the launch of a new Savage Sour Apple flavor with a sweeps tied to Sega of America, San Francisco. In-store P-O-P encourages shoppers to enter for a chance to win prizes including Sega Dreamcast systems, copies of the Sonic Shuffle videogame, and thousands of free gum packages. Top winner receives a Shuffle party with Sonic the Hedgehog and a DJ, plus a Dreamcast. The winner also gets a personalized Web site highlighting the Shuffle party on Sega.com. The effort runs through December.
