Tide is capitalizing on the high visibility of its “Talking Stain” Super Bowl TV spot with two contests centered on the campaign.
An instant-win game lets users put their face and voice on the stain, and a call for user-generated video could turn into a prime-time commercial spot.
The brand has extended its offline TV buy—Tide’s first Super Bowl ad, and only the third for a Procter & Gamble product—with a large package of online features and contests at MyTalkingStain.com, which features the Tide to Go stain remover pen.
A 30-second spot for the product showed a hapless job applicant being shouted down in an interview by a large, loud, gibbering stain on his shirt. The spot was singled out as one of the most successful of the thirty-odd commercials aired during the Super Bowl, at a cost of about $2.7 million each.
Visitors to the Talking Stain site can “Be the Stain” and qualify for instant win prizes. They can upload their own photos to the video as it appeared during the game, and can either add their own voice by dialing a toll-free phone number or use the audio from the spot. They can then download the mashup to their computer, e-mail it to friends or embed it in a blog or personal Web page.
Whatever people choose, they’re invited to find out if they have won one of the more than 1,000 prizes Tide is giving away daily until March 3, including one Tide-branded iPod a day and lots of Tide T-shirts, Tide to Go pens and coupons for Tide products.
Visitors with greater video ambitions can enter a ‘My Talking Stain” spoof contest, creating their own video about a stain embarrassment that the Tide to Go pen can solve and posting them to a Tide Talking Stain channel on YouTube. Tide provides a downloadable “Spoof toolkit” including logos and graphics.
Rules for the contest specify a 30-second spot on “the type of situations that an embarrassing stain could ruin— a first date, an interview, an important meeting.” They also specify the stains the Tide to Go pen can remove. Just as importantly, the instructions specify which stains the product can’t solve (grease, blood or ink) and warns entrants to stay away from depicting those to comply with truth in advertising regulations.
Entrants must also feature the pen in their video, although they needn’t show it in action. And they have to end with the tagline, “Silence the stain instantly.” Entries for the user-generated video competition will be accepted until midnight on March 9. Shortly afterward, an expert panel from Tide will select up to 10 finalists, and visitors to the Tide to Go channel on YouTube will be able to vote for the one they think deserves national attention.
The winning user-created spot will be aired around the country during prime time at some point later in the year, according to Tide spokesman Kash Shaikh.
Besides customizing the commercial and creating their own video, visitors to the microsite can download the jabbering “talking stain” as a ringtone or an MP3 or get the stain as wallpaper for their computer screen or as a buddy icon for personal Web pages.
“We knew that if we were driving people to this site we needed it to be a place where they could be engaged, share with their friends and have some fun,” Shaikh said. “We knew that this was going to have to be a step up from what we’d done on the Web in the past, to give people a lot of things to do and to talk about on the site.”
The “Talking Stain” commercial won high marks both in public polls and among industry experts for memorability and effectiveness. The USA Today Ad Meter rating gave the spot among the top 10 aired at Super Bowl XLII, above both Pepsi’s Justin Timberlake spot and the Victoria’s Secret ad.
By the end of Super Bowl Sunday, the ad, which aired during the first quarter of the game, had driven more than 30,000 unique visits to MyTalkingStain.com, and visitors had created more than 5,500 customized ads. The spot also received more than 100,000 views on YouTube that day.
And Reprise Media scored the commercial a “touchdown” for its strong integration of online components such as a prominent URL, a microsite specific to the spot and extension search marketing to make the ad and the site easy to find on the Web.
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