There’s an old saying that “Timing is everything,” and truth be told, it really is. If you look at the retail landscape, you’ll find that everybody and their brother wants to be merchandised in stores around the holidays. And for good reason. Consumers will spend $220 billion during the season this year.

Conversely, the period after New Year’s Eve traditionally has been regarded as a virtual “no-brands land,” so devoid of consumer interest that it seemed the only products worth merchandising were diet foods, gym memberships and snow blowers.

More than 25 years ago, however, where others saw a promotional wasteland, Procter & Gamble saw an immense marketing opportunity. It uses the “no-brands land” period to build what has been referred to as “the company’s aircraft carrier.” After all, the products P&G sells (toothpaste, detergent, toilet tissue and shampoo, to name just a few) know no seasonality. If anything, the company’s highly consumable brands are re-stocked every January by households that delay purchase to pay for holiday luxuries.

This mammoth promotion regularly involves more than 40 brands that field coupons worth more than $40. It’s both the largest volume-producing promotion of the year, as well as the program with the lowest participation cost.

Best of all, the downtime in January was turned around to create a window in which P&G could support a group that might otherwise be overlooked: mentally handicapped athletes.

The Special Olympics were started in 1968 by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, whose siblings included not only the deceased president, but also a sister with mental disabilities. From a marketer’s perspective, one of the most appealing aspects of the program is that it’s a truly “bulletproof“ cause; there’s nothing that anyone could possibly say against it.

When the idea of tying in with the program first came to mind, P&G sent Bob Wientzen, director of Promotion & Marketing Services, to negotiate with the charity.

“I went to Washington with our agency to meet with Mrs. Shriver,” Wientzen recalls. “I explained that for every coupon we redeemed we would make a donation to Special Olympics, up to a fixed amount. I’ll never forget her looking at me and saying: ‘Let me get this straight: You take this to a store (holding up a coupon) and they give you money for it?’ She had no idea what a coupon was.”

Wientzen and his team received Mrs. Shriver’s enthusiastic blessing and returned to Cincinnati, where they eventually crafted what would become P&G’s largest promotion. Early on the company decided to tie-in with a direct mail company called Publisher’s Clearing House (PCH). PCH would become such a dominant selling force in the promotion that a generation of P&G sales people came of age referring to the effort as “The PCH.”

“It was the first really big corporate event out there,” Wientzen recalls: “It was so big that only a firm like Procter could have pulled it off. We were mailing to 61 million homes, running 500 GRPs of advertising and every major paper in the country had ads telling consumers to look for their envelope. Nobody could compete with it.”

“Once it established its track record, P&G owned the first half of January,” says Steve Buxbaum, former Colgate director of promotion. “We wanted to execute our own multi-brand promotion as early in January as possible, but P&G’s Special Olympics event pushed us to the back half of the month.”

The method P&G used to involve consumers was nothing short of groundbreaking. P&G’s coupon envelopes announced in bold print that they would donate to Special Olympics five cents for every coupon redeemed. An asterisk qualified that the company would donate up to a fixed amount ($1 million in the early years). P&G reached its capped donation amount by the first morning of in-home delivery.

After the first few years of trial and error, P&G developed a sales strategy that guaranteed success. Sales teams composed of account representatives from every division in the company would descend en masse on key accounts every July to present the coming January’s program. Customers used to laugh at how P&G’s salespeople would all meet in their lobby and have to introduce themselves to each other.

The Shrivers may not have known much about coupons, but they more than made up for this by who they knew. P&G had unwittingly tapped into a gold mine of celebrity presenters when they aligned with Special Olympics. By the early 1980s, P&G’s sales teams brought in A-List stars like Sally Struthers (All in the Family), Dick Sargeant (Bewitched) and Susan Saint James (McMillan and Wife), as well as a host of athletes like Olympian Rafer Johnson, baseball’s Johnny Bench and Pittsburgh Steeler Rocky Blier, to help make their presentations.

P&G even enrolled Eunice Shriver in one notable call. “We’d had a request from our Philadelphia district manager for a little help with one of their top accounts,” Wientzen recalls. “The customer involved had never cared much for Procter, and so when he was introduced to Mrs. Shriver, he ripped into her. ‘Of course, you know that P&G is just using your charity to sell more goods,’ he said. ‘They’re our largest corporate contributor,’ she calmly replied, ‘and we wish more companies would use us this way.’”

It became part of Procter lore that this account consistently supported Special Olympics afterward. P&G’s promotion has changed remarkably little in 27 years.

“Procter & Gamble has been one of Special Olympics’ pioneer partners,” says Tanya Baskin, vice president-corporate partnerships for the Special Olympics. “The relationship has blossomed, now providing international support in Puerto Rico, the Middle East and North Africa region.”

Rod Taylor is senior VP-sports and promotion for CoActive Marketing in Cincinnati. He can be reached at [email protected].

Lunch with Mr. Sam

P&G had plenty of success early on with its tie to Special Olympics, but it wasn’t until Wal-Mart stepped in that the partnership really took off, says Bob Wientzen former head of P&G promotion and marketing services.

A lunch was planned that brought together Sargent Shriver, a founder of the Special Olympics, and Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton.

The two met at a small BBQ joint in Bentonville, AR. Walton pulled up in a beat-up, dusty Oldsmobile and after lunch, took the group on a tour of his first store in town and explained his theories of merchandising.

“It was quite informative, to say the least,” Wientzen says. “Sargent Shriver good-naturedly got on Sam about why didn’t he do something with our Special Olympics promotion.”

That year, tables for the Special Olympics promotion were set up in the front of every Wal-Mart, staffed by thousands of Special Olympics volunteers. “That effort gave the whole promotion a huge jumpstart,” Wientzen says.

About 2 billion TV viewers are expected to watch the 2006 Winter Games this month, with 35,000 spectators at the opening ceremony alone in Torino (aka Turin) Italy. As with every Olympics, brands are racing to the starting blocks with marketing campaigns that activate their sponsor status. This year’s field features several companies that are veterans of The Games, as well as a few venturing on the slopes for the first time. Which programs will make it to the winner’s blocks? Keep your eye on these.

Giving the World a Coke

Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the Winter Games stretches far beyond Torino, Italy. The company, which dropped a reported $100 million to renew its sponsorship of The Games for eight more years, is activating the deal with events, on-pack promotions, instant-win games, TV spots, ties with athletes and even random acts of kindness as it presses its message across the globe—all around the tagline “Live Olympic”.

In the U.S., a “Drink. Watch. Cheer. Win” on-pack promotion features two-time Olympic medalist Michelle Kwan; freestyle skier and silver medalist Joe Pack; 2002 Olympic bobsleigh champion Vonetta Flowers: short track speed skater and two-time medalist Apolo Anton Ohno; and skier Ralph Green, a 2006 Paralympic Games hopeful. Consumers enter the codes and are assigned a Winter Games event. If the U.S. wins any medal, the player gets a coupon for five two-liter bottles of Coke products. Other prizes include: 17 trips for two to dine with the U.S. Olympic Team in Washington, D.C. in May and one grand-prize trip for two to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. An online sweeps, in partnership with NBC, which is airing The Games, and Universal Inc., offered a chance to win a trip to a Coca-Cola “Live Olympic” opening ceremony viewing party at Universal Orlando.

In Switzerland, an on-pack promotion with a large retailer sold out in the first week, as players scrambled to win trips for two to the closing ceremonies. Scratch cards in shopping malls offer ski passes and commemorative 2006 cans from the Games.

Canadian consumers will find an on-pack offer for a chance to win one of three trips to an Olympic Winter Games host city. (Vancouver is hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics).

In host country Italy, local activities swirl around the torch relay and branded field reps roam the streets performing random act of kindness.

“If they see somebody doing good, they give them something nice,” says Philipp Bodzenta, a global spokesperson for Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola has wrapped plenty of fundraising into its overall campaign to support Olympic hopefuls. the company has been an Olympics Games sponsor for more than 75 years.

Big Red Shoes in the Starter Blocks

By Amy Johannes
McDonald’s Corp. is spreading word of its long-time sponsorship of the Olympic Games by branding cups, packaging and its new gift card, the Arch Card, with images of U.S. athletes. Its restaurants around the world are activating the sponsorship in a variety of ways, but all share a common theme with the look and feel of the Olympic branded packaging. McDonald’s has also tapped the host city, Torino, as the locale to debut nutritional information on most of its product packaging.

“Not only do we want to serve good food, but [we want to] promote a healthy, active lifestyle with kids and families,” says Nick Marrone, senior director, global sports marketing for McDonald’s.

New for this year, McDonald’s Olympic Champion crewmembers will launch an online blog chronicling their journeys to Torino and Olympic experiences once there. The site goes live Feb. 6 as part of the company’s Olympic Champion Crew Celebration, at McDonalds.com.

Under the sponsorship—the company’s sixth consecutive year as the official restaurant of the Olympic Games—McDonald’s will bring its top crewmembers (300 employees from around the world) to The Games to serve attendees. The company will feed more than 15,000 coaches, athletes, media and Olympics officials for free at two full-service restaurants in the Torino Olympic Village.

In Canada, customers can buy one of six mini jerseys from the country’s Olympic Hockey Team with a restaurant purchase of fries, a drink, hash browns or a side salad this month. The mini jerseys are available for $2.99 through Feb. 28 or while supplies last.

Through the Olympic Youth Program, McDonald’s in Germany will send a group of children to The Games. In China, restaurants will use the Winter Games to jumpstart the country’s role to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, launching McDonald’s Beijing logo, Marrone says.

“We can touch 50 million consumers [a day] around the world,” he says. “It’s wonderful for us to have a relationship with a movement that has great values…to deliver key messages to our audience and create a unique experience in our restaurants.”