“We hope you liked the movie. Would you like some Crest Whitestrips?”
Sounds strange, but that is exactly what P&G did recently as part of a very clever product sampling program. At the conclusion of the film “He’s Just Not That Into You,” which featured a scene with Crest Whitestrips, Crest brand representatives handed out 200,000 promo packs in five major markets. The packs included samples of the product, a coupon and a fun tie in to the movie. (You can read more here)
It isn’t easy to create demand for a product in today’s world. People know they control their attention. I don’t watch t.v. commercials. I ignore banner ads. I get my news from RSS feeds and Twitter. How does a brand tell me about a new product without annoying or alienating me? This is a huge issue for brands.
Brian Morrissey made the case recently that brands can’t give up on interruptive advertising. His argument: Google has built an amazing system for harvesting existing demand (we tried to improve upon their model at Jellyfish), but brands still need to interrupt to create the demand in the first place. I agree with Brian that interruptive advertising isn’t going away anytime soon, but I think the answer is to interrupt in ways that create value to the end user. The value can come from entertaining me, surprising me in a fun way, giving me status, and (of course) putting some extra savings in my pocket.
I salute P&G for finding a way to interrupt people in a fun, and valuable way. You can see other great sampling examples here.
Our team at Alice is working hard to give brands other value-added ways to create and harvest demand. It’s part of the evolution of advertising that we’ve been fascinated with for a long time.
I completely agree that companies need to change the way they advertise. I’m on twitter and one day I tweeted that I had a cold. Right away a company that makes a cold medication replied to me and gave me a link to a coupon for their product. I thought this was very interesting, and very effective.
Thanks for the comment Tyler. Love the example. One of the challenges companies have in this regard is to not appear as Big Brother, monitoring your activities. There is a balance to be struck here for sure.
[...] Be personal. Mass emails are interruptive advertising. They are the commercials I skip, the billboards I glaze over and the fliers that line the trash. [...]
[...] Be personal. Mass emails are interruptive advertising. They are the commercials I skip, the billboards I glaze over and the fliers that line the trash. [...]
[...] it’s safe because a good friend recommended it. Using toothpaste may be more exciting because you got a free sample after a movie. You might cry for hours over a broken bowl because it belonged to your [...]