Doritos continues to tap its audience
Last year, Doritos invited aspiring filmmakers to compete in creating an advertisement, which ran during the Super Bowl. The campaign generated quite a bit of buzz in the press.
Hoping to duplicate the experience, the brand is following up this year with a different consumer-engagement contest: offering a fledgling band the chance to be featured during the Super Bowl. With the new twist, Doritos hopes to target a different segment of the population, and to position the brand as young and hip.
In keeping with this positioning, Doritos has also created the "SNACK STRONG Productions" website, which is being advertised through MySpace and features music-themed games and activities. Visitors can "lay down their own tracks" with hip-hop artist Missy Elliott in an interactive recording studio experience, and they can also play Microsoft's first user-generated video games.
Philips spreads the satire
Doritos has been innovative in utilizing social networking through MySpace to get its message out. Others are following suit. It seems that every other day the front page of MySpace is advertising something different, from movies to charities, and that is not taking into account the viral messages being spread amongst friends.
Philips is one of those companies. For its Body Groomer product, the company took its liberal "off-color" message to MySpace. While the company could have been more sensitive, with such a popular itemto work with, it simply took the opportunity to have fun. The website featured a video of a guy singing about his love for the Philips Body Groomer, while wearing a bathrobe and cowboy boots -- a comical variation on the stereotypical country theme. The site included an interactive area where visitors could "try out the product" on a virtual shrub.
As a follow-up, the latest Philips interactive experience is an online commercial promoting the Ear and Nose Trimmer. The ad features a man who, while looking at himself in a bathroom mirror, turns to severe emotional distress and panic at his discovery of an extraordinarily long nose hair. His father, on the other side of the bathroom door, knowingly reassures him that it happens to everyone. The father slips his son an educational pamphlet reminiscent of a 1960s sexual education tutorial, entitled "Second Puberty and You." They bond with one another over the experience and go out for breakfast with a deeper father-son relationship. The commercial ends leaving the consumer a satirical interactive pamphlet to peruse.
The site encourages consumers to help their friends who "are experiencing second puberty and need some hope." It is fresh, comical and keeps things interesting and engaging.