INMA_A01.QXD

(National Geographic (Little) Kids) #1

Interactive tools such as a ‘healthy eating calculator’
which calculates body mass index have proved popular.
Such content is also effective at drawing visitors to the
site through search engine marketing when they are
searching for health and nutrition advice.


Permission marketing as Birdseye asks ‘Are you a
Salad Boy or a Wrap Girl?’
One example of this approach was a campaign to pro-
mote chicken fillet strips; offline print creative (100,000
leaflets) encouraged users to text in on 2 shortcode mes-
sages for the chance to win a trip to Mount Everest.
Similar prizes were also offered via online partner sites
and radio stations to extend the reach of the campaign
further. The creative encouraged mobile phone owners to
‘Text and Win’ because of the immediacy and wider
access to mobile phones. However, entry was also avail-
able via a web site.
Food brand Peperami has also been actively marketed
online, with agency AKQA creating a ‘too hot for TV’
microsite that generated 20,000 orders for a trial within
the first ten days and the ad was spread virally to over
100,000 online.


Lynx says: ‘Spray more, get more’
Unilever-owned male bodycare brand Lynx has been an
enthusiastic adopter of digital. In 2004, it won the New
Media Ageadvertising effectiveness award in the online
advertising category. The online Lynx Pulse campaign was
created to support a TV ad, which featured a ‘geeky guy’
dancing in a bar with two attractive girls to the soundtrack
‘Make Luv’, which was later released and reached number
one in the UK charts. The online creative used a series of
dots to animate the dancer and featured the same music.
The online creative ran as banner advertising and over-
lays, a 30-second screensaver on the microsite and as a
viral e-mail.
The target audience for the campaign was 16–25-year-
old men, and web site advertising placements included
NME, MTV, The Sun, Kiss, Ministry of Sound, FHM and
Student UK. The imagery was so popular that it was
inserted into the end frame of the TV ad. It was also used
in offline promotion activity across Europe.
The online campaign specifically aimed to raise brand
awareness, offer brand interaction, promote trial and drive
traffic to the Pulse microsite. It reached over 1.4m unique
users online with average clickthrough rates on banners
as high as 23%. According to dynamic logic figures,
online advertising awareness rose by 326% after the cam-
paign. The judges described it as ‘a clever campaign with
strong creative’. They also commented on the high pro-
duction quality, which really stood out compared to other
entrants, and said the site backed up well what the brand
was doing offline.


In 2005, as part of an £11m ‘Spray more, get more’
marketing campaign, Lynx again created a microsite
‘lynxladspad.com’ with digital assets such as videos of
the ads and screensavers. It also encouraged them to
spray (or vote for) objects within the pad to collect ‘spray
points’ for a chance to win prizes, including five lads’ pad
weekenders in Ibiza. This approach appears to be an evo-
lution of the campaign-specific microsite which needs to
be revised for each campaign. Using a more permanent
site such as lynxladspad.com can be used as a holding
site which is updated for each campaign. Associated
microsites may still be used, for example in 2005 a viral
campaign ‘lynxgirlslive.com’, which was a spoof adult
video webcam game in which users can interact with
two scantily clad females by typing in actions they want
to see the girls do, such as dance, pillow fight and
strip. The viral was seeded on viral and lads’ sites,
including Contraband.co.uk, Milkandcookies.com and
various chatrooms.

Persil – making detergent fun online?
You may not have visited a detergent site recently, but
Persil has shown that through developing the right propo-
sition, this is possible. The typical target user is what
Persil refers to as ‘progressive mums’ – busy working
mothers with children aged under 10, who have Internet
access both at home and work.
Persil has used interactive communications to get
closer to its audience by creating an experience of inter-
acting with the brand. Ounal Bailey, Persil brand activation
manager, talking to Revolution(2003), explains the pur-
pose of their on-site communications as follows: ‘We
wanted to create a real identity online, making persil.com
a hub of information and an online brand experience. At
this time, the site moved from a focus on product informa-
tion to two main sections: Time-In or Product-related
information and Time-Out which is about lifestyle and was
divided into time for Mum such as relaxation, looking after
skin and diet and time with the kids.’
One campaign which was customer-centric rather than
product-centric was ‘Get Creative’ which encouraged the
artisitic tendencies of children. Persil ran a £20 million
integrated campaign that included press, direct mail,
radio, online and PR. The Persil 'Big Mummy' challenge
saw 15,000 children submit drawings of their parents. To
drive entries, Persil used expandable banners and
Tangozebra’s Overlayz – a dhtml format that allows highly
animated creative to float across the screen. Six sites
were used to place the ads, including MSN.co.uk, Yahoo!
UK & Ireland and AOL UK. Expandable banners appeared
on MSN.co.uk’s Learning channel and Women’s channel,
with the Overlayz ad, featuring a ‘little monster’ from
Persil’s above-the-line work, appearing on the Women’s
channel. The clickthrough rate for the online ads was 8.33
per cent on MSN, though lower on other sites.

CHAPTER 8· INTERACTIVE MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

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