Archive for the ‘Sampling’ Category

Announcing Our Free Sampling Program!

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Beginning today, consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers can now execute their own sampling campaigns to maximize advertising accountability and consumer value. Here’s an excerpt from our press release

Alice.com today announced a first-of-its-kind digital sampling program that allows consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers to control the entire product sampling process—from defining a specific target audience to converting delivered samples into ongoing sales. The Alice.com sampling program is the first of many advertising programs to be launched within the Alice.com platform, and represents one of the ways in which CPG manufacturers are using Alice.com to directly connect with their end consumers and gain greater accountability from their advertising.

“Sampling has traditionally been a hit-or-miss use of our advertising dollars, because of the difficulties in measuring who received a sample and whether the sample resulted in a sale,” said John Mullins, President and CEO of Sun & Earth, an all-natural, non-toxic cleaning products company. “Using the Alice.com platform, we can now leverage a rich set of data to pinpoint which consumers receive our samples, make it easy for those consumers to buy the product from us, and precisely measure whether the campaign is actually working. It’s a great way for us to treat our customer as an individual and make sure we are spending our advertising dollars wisely.”

We’re celebrating the launch of our free sampling program with a special consumer campaign. Beginning now through October 31st, consumers may find an iPod shuffle, Flip video camera, free movie rentals and more in their Alice box, in addition to targeted free product samples. Head on over to the Community blog to learn more.

Read the full press release here.

Product Sampling Gets Creative

Friday, March 20th, 2009

“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.