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.

Lincoln Financial's Recent Ad Campaign

Lincoln Financial Group recently launched an integrated marketing campaign, which completely changed their target audience from their traditional sales channel or middlemen to their end-users.  To do so, they created a series of advertisements that all came back to identifying the end-user, as the "Chief Life Officer."  The intent was to make people realize that there are a lot of important decisions they make in their life and research revealed that the more people take control of the decisions in their life, the better they feel about the direction of their lives.  With this in mind, the goal for creative was to communicate the end-user is the chief executive of their own life, so you should take charge.  This tactic was implemented through the use of promoting the empowering aspect of taking control of your finances rather than a prevention or fear tactic.  The success of these ads can largely be attributed to:

1. Changing the target audience from B2B middlemen, to the end-user (which is somewhat unconventional in B2B.
2.  Having the campaign be research-based and drawing on customer insights to shape the content
3.  Using emotional appeal to really strike a chord with the end-users
4. Using an integrated ad campaign that used digital, social, and traditional media channels

Johnnie Walker

The following is an ad by Johnnie Walker. It's the longest tracking shot in advertising history and the whole thing had to be done in one take. In fact, one might call it a short film instead of an ad.

Per our conversation about Scotland and its frontier-like image, this ad really drives it home. It's also a great "brand story", and condenses over 200 years of history into a 6 minute monologue.

Samsung vs. Apple

This advertisement of Samsung goes along with our discussion on Wednesday. Samsung decided to take the approach of going after non-users and using the tactic of category build. Samsung is trying to direct customers to their brand. In the commerical, it highlights Apple customers didn't get features in their previous release where Samsung users already had them . I think it is interesting to look at the faces of the people waiting in line because they are making excuses of why the Apple is so "cool" and worth the wait. Then it moves to showcase features that iPhone doesn't have which makes Apple customers want that product. Samsung goes after the competition in order to demonstrate the differences in their product and how Apple is lacking.  This commerical reminded me of when Apple went after Windows users. Samsung is using a similar approach.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf5-Prx19ZM&feature=youtu.be

Swagger Wagon...

I thought about this video during all of our car talks on Wednesday. Toyota seems to be targeting young parents who still want to feel cool and may not necessarily want succumb to the purchase of a mini-van. The only problem with the advertisement is that it's memorable in itself, but I couldn't recall the brand associated with it. Now that I watch it again, I see it's Toyota. Perhaps they could have included "Toyota" throughout the words in the rap or supplemented the ad with billboards that further showed that Toyota was associated with the Swagger Wagon.

Check it out, it's a pretty entertaining video.

Groupon has more problems than demand...

The class discussion on "when not to advertise" on Tuesday was fairly interesting - specifically regarding Groupon and how the salon was unable to meet the resulting demand.  Interestingly enough, advertising doesn't appear to be a strong point for Groupon in the first place.  In my intercultural communications course, we focused on the following Super Bowl commercial by Groupon (2011):

My gut instinct was to be offended at the apparent insensitivity of Groupon to the plight of Tibetans.  In evaluating the advertisement using the "AD PLAN" framework, it seems as though Groupon generates negative amplification, thereby hurting it's brand equity.

In actuality, Groupon's commercials were intended to be 'funny' through their call to action (Save the Money) while hiring a well-known actor.  Furthermore, each of the three Save the Money commercials failed to highlight their altruistic component; that is, Groupon was matching users' contributions to three different charities (up to $100,000 each).

What's your take on the commercial?  And do you think that, if executed differently, these commercials could have been successful?

World of Warcraft and Gaming

After our World of Warcraft discussion Tuesday, I recalled this song from 2009 (it was a viral hit) and thought I should post. If you're familiar with the Guild, a web comedy, you will recognize the characters but even if not, it's a fun insight into MMORPG. It's a bit suggestive but hilarious--pay attention to the lyrics.
Obviously, this was meant to promote the show (The Guild) but I think it also works in a greater space that advertises for role playing games like WOW by simultaneously poking fun of players of the game while also celebrating being a "nerd" aka, an individual or nonconformist.