National Consumer Promotion: Budget under $1 Million
April 6, 2009
Most of the time, when a comedian tells you to hold an apple in your mouth while he prepares to carve two Xs on it with a chainsaw, you should refuse. But in the case of Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Show in the World, the gag was all part of the fun. In fact, it was part of a touring marketing campaign created for the brewer by Mirrorball. The 2008 show was a cavalcade of bizarre and offbeat acts including a Japanese robotic dancer, a Russian contortionist, Venetian burlesque singers and the aforementioned Mark Faje, who bills himself the world’s most dangerous comic and does strange things with fruit.
The tour was designed to convey the brand’s unique marketing proposition against other imports, such as those that pitch themselves as the beer for tranquil beaches. Neither the Dos Equis brand nor The Most Interesting Show in the World had anything to do with tranquil.
For a campaign spending less than $1 million, it turned out to be a big-time buzz-generator for Dos Equis. During the tour, more than 15,000 consumers attended and sampled more than 40,000 bottles of Dos Equis. The event also generated upward of 99 million media impressions on local TV stations, magazines, newspapers and Web destinations such as Yahoo! and Thrillist.com.
“The Most Interesting Show in the World [tour] was arguably the best promotion [for the field] since I have been with Heineken USA,” says Michael Grimes, regional marketing manager for Atlanta and Baltimore for Heineken USA, which imports Dos Equis in this country.
Eduardo Sousa, HUSA’s regional marketing manager in Texas, sums the event up in one word: “Spectacular,” he says.
And Dos Equis and Mirrorball are hoping that success breeds success in the case of The Most Interesting Show in the World. The companies already are preparing a second tour for 2009.
In the online travel game, consumer loyalty is a rare bird. Orbitz.com set out to do something about that with national, multi-pronged campaign created by GMR Marketing of Chicago.
The effort, dubbed “Orbitz Fill the Plane,” targeted busy business and leisure travelers by getting them to enter an online contest in which participants tried to get 300 friends to “fill a plane” in order to win a free trip. The effort’s tell-a-friend element made the campaign a truly viral promotion that resonated with buzz-building chatter in online blogs, traditional media vehicles and word of mouth.
In addition to a robust public relations blitz at the outset and Web banner ads that generated a hefty 22.1 million impressions, Orbitz was able to do something it had never done before: get face-to-face with its clients and prospective clients. GMR did this by deploying flight attendants in high-traffic urban areas who used a tongue-in-cheek safety demonstration to introduce the Fill the Plane program to people in person.
The initiative surpassed all performance metrics set out at the beginning by Orbitz and GMR. Maybe even more important, it helped build invaluable buzz and put the online travel agency’s quirky image and positioning front and center in an engaging promotion that was unprecedented for the category.
To celebrate the launch of its new VAIO FW notebook computer, Sony and agency PowerPact needed a marketing effort that would mirror the company’s blend of style and
substance.
They came up with the “VAIO My Graphic Splash Contest,” a one-of-a-kind call-to-action that empowered customers to create their own design for the cover (top case) of a limited edition VAIO FW notebook. With the top winners receiving a $5,000 prize and a VIP trip to Manhattan, the contest turned out to be a runaway success.
A Web site for the contest racked up 84,529 unique visitors, 819,222 page views and almost 2,800 design submissions from registered users.