These Are the Champions
Promotion people are daring people. They send identical twins to accost shoppers at supermarkets. They have people drink beer out of paper bags. They get prospects to pretend they’ve sold their souls to the devil. They even dare to challenge smokers to quit.
At Chicago’s Navy Pier in September, these bold brand warriors and more were honored for their exploits with World PRO Awards of Excellence, marking them as standard-setters for marketers around the globe. They were selected from an initial entry pool of more than 500.
Eleven promotions – all Gold winners in USA/Canada, Latin America, Europe, or Asia-Pacific regional competitions – won World PROs in 15 different categories. And eleven of the category winners this year hailed from the U.S., which rebounded after two straight years of domination from abroad.
Promotions from Malt-O-Meal, SnackWells, Jeep, and Rolling Rock each won awards in more than one category.The World PRO Awards of Excellence, the only globa l awards program in the promotion marketing industry, are a joint effort of PROMO and the Association of Promotion Marketing Agencies Worldwide.
Case histories of the winning programs follow. Read them if you dare.
BEST PROMOTION IN THE WORLD
Rolling Rock Intro
Belgium
There are more than 600 locally brewed beers lining the cramped pub walls of Belgium, but the one taken down and passed all around to most effect last year was a product of Old Latrobe, PA – Rolling Rock.
>From April to December 1998, young Belgians celebrated the first moon >landing, Bill Clinton’s birthday, and Thanksgiving with thousands of green >bottles of Rolling Rock due to the efforts of the Brussels-based Karamba >agency. Bars clamored for its 12-event promotion, client Interbrew >rejoiced, and World PRO judges swooned, awarding the Karamba campaign >awards in the account-specific and best art direction categories and >crowning it the Best Promotion in the World.
Changing tastes among young beer drinkers have given an opening to American-style lagers in Belgium, where Budweiser leads U.S. imports with ads and promos heavy on red, white, and blue images such as the Fourth of July and NFL-style football.
“We wanted to use other positive images of America instead of the Stars and Stripes,” says Karamba managing director Marc Frederix. “We wanted to make Rolling Rock more avant-garde than Budweiser.”
Buoyed by materials with campy black-and-white photos and stand-out green Rolling Rock bottles, the on-premise promotion featured monthly games, contests, and other fun stuff wrapped around playful American themes.
In The First Millionaire of Las Vegas, bar patrons received dice on neck-hangers that they could roll for free bottles of Rock.
The Happy Birthday Mr. President neck-hanger, featuring a Monroe-esque beauty playing a saxophone, was a card that could be deposited in actual U.S. Mail Boxes in bars for posting to Clinton at the White House.
Our personal favorite was The End of Prohibition promo: Drink your Rolling Rock from a paper bag, and check the number printed at the bottom to win a free case.
Karamba and Interbrew targeted the program to 450 American-style pubs, pool pubs, and small discos catering to youthful crowds. Bar owners had to agree to run eight of the 12 promotions and buy at least 100 bottles of Rolling Rock for each promo period. What’s more, they had to pledge to sell Rocks at deep discount – $2 versus the usual $3.50 – or be cut out of the program.
That never occurred, because every bar in the land wanted in. Interbrew and Karamba had hoped to sign up 300 of the targeted establishments, but all 450 hopped on board. And few were the bars that didn’t run all 12 events. Scores of other establishments that had not been approached, meanwhile, nagged Interbrew for the Rolling Rock promotion.
“We had fun with these images of America without making the promotion ridiculous,” says Frederix.
Results were hardly laughable. Interbrew would not let Frederix reveal actual sales figures, but he laid out this simple equation. “Just take a minimum of 100 bottles of beer times 450 bars times 12 promotions . . .”
. . . and you get a whole lot of Rolling Rock flowing through little old Belgium, all for a bargain price: Total cost of all 12 promotions was $300,000.
CONCEPT & TRIAL GENERATION
Betcha Can’t Taste the Difference/USA
“Double your pleasure, double your fun,” went the jingle in the last most famous piece of marketing featuring twins, the Doublemint ads from the ’60s. But Wrigley only needed two sets of twins, tops, to shoot those spots. WatersMolitor’s effort for Malt-O-Meal, by comparison, was a double-your-misery situation. The Minneapolis agency required 179 sets of identical siblings to pull off this double World PRO award winner, sure to go down in the annals of sampling history.
Client Malt-O-Meal, also of Minneapolis, wanted to get consumers to compare its bagged bargain breakfast cereals to brands like Froot Loops and Cheerios that they mimic at about a buck less per unit. WatersMolitor creative director Ray Devlin had the concept: Get identical twins as store demonstrators to drive home the parity product point.
Devlin did a plausibility study, unearthing groups such as the International Twins Association and the Twins Foundation, and learning that there are but 900,000 sets of identical twins in the U.S. The agency pitched the idea to six sampling companies, and five said no almost immediately, arguing that the project would be logistically and financially impossible. But Irvine, CA-based Super Marketing, stepped to the plate, interviewing 300 sets of twins nationwide, and running special training sessions for those selected.
In more than 1,200 stores in 25 markets, twins aggressively intercepted shoppers whose carts held one of the competitive brands and challenged them to take the taste test. An estimated 80 percent of those who complied put the national brand back on the shelf and bought the Malt-O-Meal variety.
On average, the four-hour demos moved four times the volume of a traditional eight-hour sampling session. Malt-O-Meal takeaway increased eight-fold when the twins were in-store.
USAGE/LOADING
Boise Cascade World Tour `98/USA
All the ’70s hippies may have retired to their home offices, but they can still be brought together with the power of the peace sign. To stand out among the high profiles of retail office suppliers like Staples and Home Depot, Boise Cascade Office Products enlisted St. Louis-based agency Louis London, which took the company on a ’90s version of the Magical Mystery Tour.
Boise Cascade’s three-month-long World Tour ’98 was announced to its targets (mostly women, ages 18 to 49) with a promotional flyer designed to look like a ’70s double album, with liner notes and a poster offering Tour “concert” T-shirts, Smiley Face banks, and CDs containing music of the era. Also listed were tour dates and cities. Customers could have Boise Cascade sales reps – turned out in all their tie-dyed glory – appear at their work site, snap their pictures in World Tour frames, and give them samples and collateral materials.
Tie-in partners included Rhino Records, which provided the CDs and coupons for 20 percent off other Rhino collections, and Polaroid, which supplied the cameras for the events and threw in rebates for $50 off the purchase of a Polaroid Business Edition camera.
World Tour ’98 albums found their way into the hands of 200,000 customers and prospects, 70 percent via direct mail and the rest delivered by sales reps.
Sales of promoted products hit $21 million during the Tour, a 22 percent increase over the same period the previous year. Return on the $850,000 promotional investment was $10 million.
BEST INTEGRATION & IMAGE AWARENESS/ ENHANCEMENT
Live Well, Snack Well/ USA
Nabisco’s SnackWell’s brand needed a makeover to stanch sales declines of 20 to 30 percent a year. Nabisco reformulated its recipes and tapped WatersMolitor, Minneapolis, to help position SnackWell’s as a health-conscious brand feeding women’s self-esteem.
The agency designed a day-long workshop for women and their 9- to 14-year-old daughters to attend together. The workshops, co-sponsored by Lifetime Television and nonprofit Girls Inc., ran in 27 markets. Girls and moms spent part of the day apart discussing their dreams and accomplishments, then joined each other to compare notes and do more activities together. Participants registered via print ads, on-pack forms, or snackwells.com. Girls Inc. ran the sessions. One teenager called it “the best vacation I ever had, because I spent it with my mom.”
A separate near-pack offer on 5,000 supermarket displays gave away Mother-Daughter Journals with SnackWell’s purchase. The brand also participated in women’s health expos, sampling its reformulated cookies and crackers and distributing a list of books “authored in the spirit of living well.”
WatersMolitor also created an “aspirational icon” to tie SnackWell’s efforts together, and a toll-free “Live Well” line and Web site (snackwells.com) dispensed information on all SnackWell’s events as well as topics of interest to women. The promotions ran over four months to complement SnackWell’s emotional image ad campaign.
Six months into the relaunch, sales were up 3 percent versus a 25-percent decline the year before. Retailers accepted all the Journal displays Nabisco offered, and calls to the “Live Well” line (flagged on packages) doubled every month.
INTERACTIVE
Renault Clio II CD-Web Game/Spain
Once you’ve sold your soul to the devil, what do you do for an encore? Renault suggests cruising the world in a Clio II, its sporty new entry aimed at 18- to 30-year-olds. TV spots launched the car by following the adventures of a Faustian young man who travels through history after getting eternal life – and a Clio – from the devil.
This promotion extended the ad campaign with a CD-ROM game, a first for Spain, called “Do you dare to play with the devil?” Players travel through historical events like the Stock Market crash and the attack on Pearl Harbor to solve puzzles. Clues on Clio’s Web site help players solve the puzzles as they compete to win one of two cars. Two hundred top scorers win free accessories when they buy a Clio.
Renault and its agency Below Marketing, Madrid, used the game to build a database of potential buyers. The CDs linked to Clio’s Web site, where players registered to compete by answering a questionnaire of personal data. The site posted player rankings, and Renault gave a free 10-day connection to consumers without Internet access.
Renault distributed 380,000 CDs via an insert in Quo magazine and another 50,000 through dealerships. Clio II clocked a 66-percent participation rate, and got 20,000 requests for more CDs.
DEALER/SALES FORCE
Dole Great Restaurant Salads Intro/USA
Dole Foods hosted a mouth-watering meeting for its 32 brokers to launch Great Restaurant Salads, a new gourmet entry into the fast-growing bagged salads segment. Dole wanted to overtake Fresh Express, whose 36 percent market share puts it just ahead of Dole’s 34 percent. The five new salad blends tested well with consumers, but Dole still had to win over the brokers to get distribution within its goal of 60 days.
Dole’s consumer promotion agency, Chicago-based Flair Communications, started with direct-mail teasers announcing a sales meeting. Brokers first got a small wooden crate of plush vegetables, then a silver dinner fork to bring to the meeting or a chance to win dinner for four at a great restaurant. The sales meeting culminated with a “Parade of Salads” – five chefs each carrying one of the Great Restaurant Salads – that let brokers sample the new line in an elegant restaurant setting with lace tablecloths and candles. Dole followed up three days later by mailing each broker a thermal bag full of salads for the family to sample. A sales contest awarded trips to France for the four top-selling brokers. The brokers gave a standing ovation when Dole’s sales director announced the contest.
Dole exceeded its sell-in projections by 53 percent, with all current grocers accepting the new line and three new chains taking Dole salads for the first time. Dole’s sales directors told Flair they’d never been so warmly congratulated for hosting such a terrific meeting.
DISPLAY ACTIVITY
Chiquita Summer Fun Club/USA
The 50-year-old banana brand put its famous Chiquita lady center stage for a summer-long continuity program targeting young families. Chiquita wanted to boost summer consumption (when there are more fresh fruits to choose from) and give retailers a program to increase total fruit and vegetable sales. That would give Chiquita an edge over Dole, since most grocers carry only one banana brand.
Dole has about the same market share but targets moms 25-34 more aggressively than Chiquita, whose icon and jingle appeal more to folks over 35 who grew up with them.
Chiquita and its agency, Botsford Group, Atlanta, created the Summer Fun Club that gave families a chart with ideas for fun things to do together and recipes for healthy snacks. Families used stickers to track activities and eating, then mailed in the completed chart to get Club premiums like inflatable pool toys and beach blankets. Each chart doubled as a sweeps entry to win a family trip on Walt Disney Co.’s new cruise ship.
Grocers could only get the program if they agreed to put up life-size Chiquita lady displays, run circular ads, and expand Chiquita displays 15 percent or more. To speed up in-store execution, Chiquita offered Eddie Bauer gear to the first 100 produce managers in each of three regions who sent in photos of their displays.
Chiquita’s sales force said they’d never get the display support. Well, they were wrong. Ninety percent of Chiquita’s grocers signed up (a 60 percent increase over ’98) and 88 percent of participants complied. That helped Chiquita rack up double-digit sales increases and make its icon more relevant to young families.
TRAFFIC BUILDING
Titanic Midnight Sale/USA
What may go down in the record books (not the North Atlantic) as the shortest promotion of all time (two hours) generated an estimated $9 million in media for Blockbuster Video and brought 17 percent of inactive members back to the stores.
Blockbuster and its agency, Promotional Resources Group of New York City, exploited what it knew would be the most hyped video release in history by being the first outlet to offer it for sale. No retailer was allowed to sell or rent Titanic before Sept. 1, 1998, so Blockbuster extended the closing time at all its stores to 2 a.m., putting the video on sale at the stroke of midnight.
Most large retailers pre-sold the movie prior to release, but Blockbuster gave consumers $5 Blockbuster gift cards when they presented $5 deposits. The first 100 people to buy or rent Titanic in each Blockbuster outlet received a replica Titanic boarding pass with instructions to call a toll-free number within 24 hours for a chance to win a luxury cruise or trips to see “Titanic The Movie On Tour” at a Paramount Studios theme park.
Los Angeles stores reported as many as 400 people lined up at midnight, and cops had to be called in to direct traffic around some Blockbusters in Chicago. The chain pre-sold more than a million copies of Titanic, the most by any retailer in video industry history. Nearly half of the people who took part in the sale said they would not have bought the video from Blockbuster if it weren’t for the extended hours. The toll-free number received 865,000 calls within the first hour of the promotion (midnight to 1 a.m.), and a total of more than two million calls during the rest of the day.
On Titanic’s video release date, Blockbuster managed to give a sinking feeling to all of its competitors.
DIRECT/DATABASE & COPYWRITING
Camp Jeep/USA
Next year, they’re going to have to find a bigger camp. In early 1999, Daimler Chrysler charged Bozell Worldwide with getting 2,500 Jeep owners signed up for its annual Camp Jeep rally by July 31, 1999. But with Bozell’s Detroit-based direct response unit, Budco, working the databases, phones, and mails in World PRO Award-winning form, it was idling-room-only by May 25.
The agency started with a database of 1.3 million owners and employed a scoring method for their “probability of attending Camp Jeep” to whittle the list down to 450,000. High marks were given to Camp Jeep alumni, customers of the Jeep Provisions catalog, and attendees of Jeep 101 events held in 23 different markets.
Budco prioritized owners who lived within 800 miles of Camp Jeep’s site in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, as well as those who fit into 17 demographic niches and four lifestyle clusters with higher propensity to attend.
Invitation mailings with detailed rundowns on planned activities and color photos of past Camp Jeep events went out to the half-million targets. Later, they were split into two categories: registrants, who signed up immediately, and responders, who requested further information.
Responders were encouraged to register either through an 800-number or a Web site, and Budco made follow-up calls to those who did not register after a set period of time.
After registering, owners received confirmation packets that asked them to call back the toll-free number to pre-schedule activities. All registrants were sent Final Event Kits providing them with maps, personalized schedules, and entry credentials.
LOYALTY/CONTINUITY
The Committed Quitters Program/ USA
In most cases, continuity programs help consumers save a little money. This continuity program from SmithKline Beecham helps save consumers’ lives.
Noting that the first nicotine replacement product on the market, Nicotrol from Johnson & Johnson’s McNeil unit, suffered from low repeat purchase levels, Smith-Kline marketers turned to promotional tactics to increase compliance for its Nicorette gum and Nicoderm CQ patches.
Purchasers of starter kits for both products call a toll-free number to enroll in the Committed Quitters Program, which draws upon 20 years of scientific research to provide people with the psychological tools to walk away from one of the world’s most powerful addictions. On the phone, they are asked questions about their smoking history, reasons for quitting, and situations that give them the greatest concern for relapse.
About five days after the call is made, a participant receives a 20-page calendar with specific quit dates and suggestions pegged to his or her questionnaire responses. Other motivational mailings follow. Nicorette users, for instance, receive a newsletter in week two, a postcard in week three, a congratulation packet in week nine, and an award certificate in week 12.
Controlled studies conducted by SmithKline showed Committed Quitters improved the average smoker’s chances of quitting by 25 percent. What’s more, CQP members used 24 more pieces of Nicorette gum and 3.5 more Nicoderm patches than non-members.
SmithKline follows up with participants a few months later, offering them a phone number for further help if they’ve relapsed.
BEST USE OF MEDIA
How Do You Eat Yours?/U.K.
To folks in the United Kingdom, this query refers to one thing only: the Cadbury Creme Egg. TV spots employed the theme for nearly 10 years to boost sales of the fondant-filled, milk chocolate ovoids that are only on sale between January and Easter. The Cadbury Egg is a leading seller during the time period, but it was being assailed by other filled “egg” candies, such as the Rolo Egg, and mainstream confectionery brands.
Wanting to roll the Egg beyond the TV sphere, but not desiring to change its popular marketing theme, Cadbury executives brought in London-based Triangle Communications and challenged the promo shop to bring the brand to life for consumers. The big idea: Have Brits answer the question that Cadbury had been posing all those years.
TV ads and point-of-purchase displays invited consumers to call a toll-free number and tell Cadbury how they ate theirs. Those judged the most innovative egg-gobblers would get to demonstrate their methods in national TV spots.
Each of the 15,000 people who called the Egg line received a Creme EggHead (a flesh-colored latex swimming cap printed with the tag, “How Will You Eat Yours?”) in the mail along with a letter from television personality Matt Lucas, who stars in the Creme Egg ads.
Fifty finalists were selected and invited to attend a weekend competition at Cadbury World (an exhibition at the company’s factory). Twelve of those were picked to appear in TV ads, which began airing the day after Easter Sunday.
The spots ranked in Marketing magazine’s top ten recall list for three consecutive weeks, and Creme Egg volume rose 5 percent over the previous year, despite a selling season that was 8 percent shorter.
