"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)

Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing | The New Digital Marketing Landscape
• At General Mills’ Millsberry.com website, children are encouraged to make the
“best movie” about “Lucky” (of Lucky Charms) and then vote for the winning
video. The site provides a pre-branded kit of settings and spokescharacters,
making it easy to combine them into a personalized commercial. 196
• Pizza Hut launched a recent contest inviting pizza enthusiasts to create a short
video “demonstrating their devotion to Pizza Hut Pizza” and showing why they
should earn the title of “Honorary Vice President of Pizza.” Contestants were
encouraged to engage in a variety of creative acts to show their loyalty to the
brand, such as “decorating their room with Pizza Hut memorabilia.” Entrants
submitted their videos on YouTube, ensuring they would be seen by thousands
of viewers, whether they won or not. 197
• With a code from a 20-oz bottle of Sprite, visitors to the Lebron 2323 site were
invited to “help create a theme song for LeBron James.” The site offered online
audio and video mixing tools to enable young people to remix the audio track to
a Sprite Sublymonal television spot featuring the NBA star. Add a viral element
(“Promote your track on your social networking profile to get votes—the top vote
getters get judged by LeBron James and our celebrity artists—Paul Wall & Al
Fatz...”) and the promise of broad exposure (“The top 3 tracks get premiered in
the new Sprite/LeBron TV spot during NBA All-Star 2007”), and Coca-Cola’s
Sprite division enjoyed the support of thousands of volunteer online marketers.
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While some industry observers have expressed concern over consumers gaining
too much control and creating videos that may undermine, rather than enhance, a
brand’s image, most marketers have figured out how to make the boom in user-generated
content work for them. For example, the Coca-Cola Company initially played down the phenomenal
success of the unauthorized viral video—viewed by millions on YouTube—in
which Mentos candy is dropped into a Diet Coke, triggering a chemical explosion. Officials
told The Wall Street Journal that while the video was “entertaining,” it didn’t “fit with the
brand personality.” However, the company subsequently decided to proactively build consumer-generated
content into its Coke.com site, tempering unfettered online expression
with a carefully calculated campaign. “We give the structure, we try to give the guidance,”
one official told IQ Interactive, “but we’re looking for consumers to fill it with content
that’s relevant to them rather than us talking to them.” 199 In August 2006, the website
began featuring a series of monthly challenges that encourage people around the world
to create videos in response to a theme. The first challenge on the site, “The Essence of
You,” asks, “If you could bottle the essence of you and share it with the world, what story
would you tell?” Visitors can vote on each other’s work, and the winner is awarded about
$5,000 worth of video equipment and editing software. “We’re bringing a global creative
community together,” explained a Coke spokesperson. “It’s not just the U.S. creative
teenagers uploading their videos. It’s going to be everyone around the world, and you’re
going to see everybody’s [stuff].” 200
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