(Promo) 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.
Network
