Posts Tagged ‘Healthy Choice’

Inside the Making of an Entertaining Banner Ad

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

distraktion

I’ve frequently taken the keynote stage or space in this blog to claim that banner ads are not the savior of digital marketing and marketing in general. I believe that too many traditional marketers have embraced banners as the easy way to “go digital” and fail to understand how this new media can allow for much deeper brand connections. That said, sometimes business goals require us to drive Awareness, and banner advertising can be a solution if it is done well. And my team at Bridge Worldwide is always pushing the creative/technical boundaries to deliver banners with meaning—which brings me to today’s post on some entertaining banners we recently launched for the Healthy Choice brand at ConAgra Foods.

Providing real entertainment is often a great way to make the banner ad meaningful to people who encounter such advertising on any given website visit. One of our best examples was the banner we did for Pringles last summer that resulted in 300,000 people choosing to visit our staging server and play with the banner over the course of a weekend. Oh, yeah, and we won a Cannes Gold Cyber Lion for this ad, too.

In the case of Healthy Choice, our advertising in recent years has revolved around convincing consumers to re-evaluate a brand that had come to be mainly focused on 50-year-old and older people who were told by their doctors to eat better. The brand has made significant improvements on the quality and appeal of its food, and our marketing has used humor and entertainment to get a 30-something consumer to notice what’s new with the brand. This is what drove our Working Lunch online improv show last year, and the recent campaign with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Both campaigns successfully launched new products for the brand.

We were recently brought in to work on a new campaign, alongside Nitro/Sapient, which handles the brand’s television and print creative. The agency developed a print-focused campaign in which characters from a fake print ad on one page of a magazine look longingly at a Healthy Choice ad on the opposite page. It is a clever campaign, and our team was eager to figure out how to make it work online. In fact, we were excited that the digital space would allow us to bring it to life in a very fun way.

Go ahead and click this link to see what our team came up with. It’s a live URL that we’ll keep up, so feel free to forward it to your friends, too.

Our Healthy Choice team recently shared some of its keys to success in developing this banner at an all-company meeting—lessons that others might benefit from as well. First, they first shared the concept with our media planning and buying partner agency months in advance so that we could secure this type of rich media placement. Second, they did prototype filming of the ad to figure out how to actually make it work. Stand-ins from our office helped our production team understand what would need to happen in the actual shoot, thus saving us and the client time and money. Finally, the team worked with Eyeblaster to ensure that we could get the two ads to appear on the exact right timing. This is actually a type of sync that the folks at Eyeblaster said no one had tried before.

Unfortunately I cannot share results of the program because it just started, however I hope you agree that it brings some levity and fun to a medium that has brought mainly annoyance and irrelevance since the first banner was displayed 15 years ago. If you must make a banner—make it meaningful (please!).

Tags: ,
Posted in Banners, Entertainment | No Comments »

Healthy Choice Offers “One Little Review”

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

healthy choice review

(Today Megan West, one of our rising star strategic planners, takes over for a guest blog post about a program that she and our ConAgra Foods team at Bridge Worldwide led for the Healthy Choice brand. I think this is another example of how social media is not a strategy, but rather offers many tactics that can help deliver better results on a strong overall marketing strategy. For more examples see my previous posts on Golden Tee, Estee Lauder, and MoMA.)

In September 2009, Healthy Choice launched a new TV spot featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in which the main call to action was to drive consumers to the brand website to print a high-value coupon. This was a first for our Healthy Choice team, and the number of people who would actually visit the site was a complete unknown. To be clear, this wasn’t just a 3-second tag or 10-point font callout at the end of the spot, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus herself telling people to go print a coupon online.

This was big. We were going to give away massive amounts of $2 printable coupons for two Healthy Choice products. And we also saw an opportunity to capitalize on this influx of visitors by giving them an opportunity to register for the Healthy Choice relationship marketing program after they printed, which offers a promise of more offers and goodies in their inbox.

Because this campaign was about trial of the new Healthy Choice products, getting a bunch of new registrants into the database was a tertiary benefit for many of the key stakeholders on the brand. But the digital team challenged itself to make sure these new people stayed active and engaged with the brand far beyond a commercial message and coupon redemption.

The Idea: Bite-Sized Reviews

We saw an opportunity to hit our trial goals and build long-term loyalty by implementing a “Bite-Size” review program. Here’s how it works:

  • Two weeks after printing the coupon (i.e., enough time to go to the store, redeem it, and try the meal), consumers who registered for the Healthy Choice newsletter are sent a welcome email.
  • The email invites them to come give a mini-review of what they thought about the product in exchange for another coupon. We offer $1 off any two products to encourage repeat purchase of different varieties.
  • At the review site, consumers choose the product they tried, rate it, and post a 140-character or fewer review of what they think.

healthy choice review 2

They then get a preview of the review and the opportunity to share their review in real time by pushing it out via their personal Twitter or Facebook accounts. The tool makes it simple for consumers to sign into their account and update their status.

We put a lot of thought into what information we want them to be able to share via Twitter. As marketers, our immediate thought was, “Make sure to get the URL in there,” but after really thinking about the true objective of pushing out reviews (awareness for the products), we decided to leave it off to give consumers more space to write their review.

Why It’s Meaningful for Consumers:

  • It sends them an email soon after signing up, showing that the brand is going to deliver on the promise of “More Offers” and validating their reason for signing up.
  • It gives consumers a chance to post their actual thoughts about the products they tried, with no content censorship by the brand. This lets people know that the brand believes in its products and really wants to know what people think about them.

How It Delivers Marketing Results for the Brand:

  • It leverages our consumers’ social-media networks to build awareness of the brands’ products in the form of actual consumer language.
  • It keeps news registrants active and delights them with additional offers and a chance to share their thoughts, hopefully turning them into brand advocates.
  • The brand soon hopes to launch a Rating and Review section for all of the products on HealthyChoice.com (because they have recently re-launched the brand with all new food formulas and tasty new dishes!), and this helps us to build a repository of “seed” reviews that can pre-populate that section. We planned for this by asking consumers who submit reviews to agree to let Healthy Choice publish them for marketing materials later.

It’s far too early to report in results of this campaign and the specific review tool, and this gets into the area where we want to keep data confidential, anyway. But you can see for yourself the amount of reviews posted to Twitter by checking out the responses to @Healthy_Choice. As you can see, the reviews are starting to come in nicely in terms of amount and reaction. Taking just one example, @debbiemekler says: “Tried @Healthy_Choice Grilled Chicken Marinara. Tasty and well-seasoned. Would try move in the future.” This great, personal review went out to her 50 followers, who trust what she says as word of mouth, not advertising.

This goes to show that brands can benefit by finding ways to turn traditional marketing programs such as coupon offers into a way to tap into consumers’ growing desire to share socially.

healthy choice review 3

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Connection, Coupons, Social Networking, Solution | 1 Comment »

The Year of… Equity Campaigns?

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

It’s 12:18 a.m. as I write this. I’ve been continuing work since putting the kids down for bed at 8 p.m. But something is keeping me awake—marketing WITHOUT meaning. It will keep me up even later if I don’t address it now!

In the past few days, I have run across several examples of big, powerful brands that are attempting to correct falling sales by simply launching a new TV campaign. All are losing opportunities to actually do something for people, rather than simply talking about themselves (see last Friday’s post for a good review of “do”). The script is usually the same: Sales are down; CMO and ad agency are fired; new ones are hired, and they need to recast the brand in a more relevant light. Solution: a brand-new ad campaign (preferably with celebrities) and a few hundred million to put it on air (preferably during the Super Bowl).

Gatorade first caught my eye with its “What’s G?” ads. A series of black-and-white commercials with voice-over of rapper Lil Wayne scrolls past a who’s who of celebrity athletes. I captured a screen grab above of some other individuals who make an appearance in the ads.

Most people who view the “What’s G?” ads are saying, “What the heck?” Viewers debate on Web forums that it might be for Nike, Guess Jeans, or… God. Some even thought it was the next Saturday Night Live digital short (that’s never good). The brand actually says the mystery was planned. According to spokeswoman Jill Kinney, “Our strategy is to create consumer intrigue and insure everyone stays tuned for more in our quest for G.”

Unfortunately, most viewers have tuned out. Number of YouTube views is the closest thing we have to a measure of a video or commercial’s popularity. It’s a good way to measure meaningful marketing—if people like something, they will choose to engage with it and share it with friends, who will view it in turn. The brand’s YouTube page shows a total of around 180,000 total views across its six posted commercials since its launch on December 23. That’s not exactly a home run.

For comparison, we just announced today that our Working Lunch live improv program for Healthy Choice has gotten 2 million video plays in only three weeks. I can guarantee our budget was a fraction of Gatorade’s! The main difference? Our program actually delivers value—it’s an entertaining program that allows the audience to play a role—while Gatorade is just talking at its audience as usual.

Gatorade is certainly not the only one using this cliche marketing playbook. Microsoft infamously launched its Bill Gates + Jerry Seinfeld “ad about nothing” over the summer thanks to Crispin Porter + Bogusky (who I usually praise here). Honda has hired celebrities to talk about “The Power of Dreams” in long-form ads that are appearing before short videos on ABC.com and Hulu. And Coca-Cola will unveil its new slogan, Open Happiness, with feel-good Super Bowl ads in two weeks.

Let’s compare these to other, smaller brands that have succeeded with something different. Red Bull has gained on Coke and Gatorade by launching events around the world. Scion became the best-selling new car brand by hosting invitation-only underground art shows. Google has never advertised on television; it just keeps pumping out valuable services.

Look, TV still remains the largest stage to get in front of consumers, and each of these brands certainly sells a “mass” audience. But I’m disappointed that none of them is trying anything truly meaningful. I predict that none of these campaigns will make a significant difference in the equity or sales of the brands that launch them.

A new TV campaign is the old success formula and definitely the path of least resistance, but the only kind of marketing that will drive breakthrough results is that which people choose to engage with—and that which itself adds value to people’s lives.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Marketing Without Meaning, Television | 2 Comments »

Serving Up a Working Lunch

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

(From time to time I like to use this space to brag about Marketing with Meaning that we launch for our clients. Today is a huge day for our agency, as we launch the Working Lunch, a live entertainment program that’s a cross between The Office and Whose Line Is It Anyway?  I asked Marc Connor, one of our star strategic planners and someone who was integral to this idea, to guest write this entry.)

Bob’s out; I’m in… at least for today. I recently joined Bridge Worldwide, and one of the most important factors in my decision was the shared vision for using marketing, in and of itself, to bring value to consumers’ lives. I carry this thought with me on every project on which I am engaged. In this competitive and fast-changing world, it is increasingly important to differentiate our brands with not just messages…but with meaning.

This week we launched the Working Lunch-another exciting and meaningful marketing program for one of our clients, the Healthy Choice brand of ConAgra Foods. ConAgra Foods has launched a new innovation in healthy, great-tasting, shelf-stable meals with Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers, and they are appealing to a broader and younger audience than the brand has sought in its history. The opportunity was to create an experience that introduced the brand and this unique product in a meaningful way to a new segment of consumers.

The insight that drove the development of the Working Lunch was that lunchtime has become the new prime time, particularly for reaching the new, gainfully employed, “distractainment”-seeking consumer. First, we learned that 60 percent of office workers regularly eat lunch at their desks. They are often multitasking at their desk through the lunch hour, working, shopping, surfing, and connecting with others. Therefore, the options are many for this audience, and as a content provider one must provide bite-sized, snackable options to get their attention. People wander in and out of the short-attention-span theater; you have to grab them quickly but make it easy for them to engage or disengage at will.

And so we created the Working Lunch, the world’s first live sketch-comedy programming delivered via the Web and powered by the audience. With the Working Lunch we’re engaging our audience at the greatest moment of receptivity, second only to being at shelf. As they eat their lunch and graze for engaging content during the few minutes of break they get at their desk, they will enjoy unpredictable live comedy and have the opportunity to influence it directly and almost instantaneously, through polls and by proposing meeting agenda topics. The world of DeLaney, Delaney, & Delaney, the inept but always humorously optimistic company whose actual business is always delightfully ambiguous, is at the center of the sketch comedy concept. The Working Lunch was developed with MSN and will be aired live for two weeks in November and another two weeks in January. We’re extending the experience by recording all the action and creating best-of clips that can be shared easily with MSN’s care package.

By positioning Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers as the sponsor for this entertaining concept, along with a generous dose of product placement throughout the show, we create a positive association and emotional involvement with the product. As the Working Lunch proves, meaningful marketing does not have to be serious to provide value. So join the fun; it’s sure to be one of the best working lunches you’ve ever experienced.

-Marc Connor, Director of Strategic Planning, Bridge Worldwide

 

Tags: , ,
Posted in Entertainment | 2 Comments »