ReFRESHing Our Memories: Understanding Those Classic Mentos Commercials

Do you suffer from the inability to forget one of those nonsense commercials from your childhood? I do and the culprit is Mentos. Mentos ran an ad campaign in the '90s in which the antagonist would experience an unexpected problem and Mentos helped the person keep their cool and come up with an unconventional solution. I never quite understood what it was about those classic Mentos commercial that caught my attention: the quirky jingle that I can recite fifteen years later, the ridiculously poor acting, or the uncanny storyboard.

In my new role as an advertising analyst, I thought it would be fun to return to the childhood commercials that will be ingrained in my memory forever and shine some light on these thirty second clips. It is obvious Perfetti Van Melle, the conglomerate that owns Mentos, was implementing a point-of-entry strategy to target youth that were looking for a different type of mint. Viewers were directed to purchase Mentos because of their "cool factor" - they helped you maintain your cool and innovate a playful solution to your problems. Mentos was the mint of choice for only one of my friends, but he consumed them all the time. This leads me to believe that the company had a gated community of loyal youth that frequently purchased their product and were looking to grow their brand with new entrants into the category.

The ads typically starred Anglo professionals in their mid-20s. Youth tend to want to act older than they are, and Mentos played on this desire by mixing professionalism and humor. The simple story board was used so that viewers could easily follow along and retain the song. According to our text book, "young children show an uncanny ability to play back advertising word for word. This is especially the case when information has a problem-episode outcome structure." This rings true with me, so everyone chime in with me:

"It doesn't matter what comes, fresh goes better in life, and Mentos is fresh and full of life. Nothing gets to you, staying fresh staying cool, with Mentos, fresh and full of life. Fresh goes better, Mentos freshness, fresh goes better with Mentos, fresh and full of life! Mentos, the freshmaker!

Please share with me a childhood commercial that you still remember today.