FCB - Foote, Cone & Belding - Brief Article

Brandweek, June 18, 2001 by Daniel Frankel

Best campaign spending $1 million or less

Media planners at Foote, Cone & Belding take great pains to avoid hollow new-media buzzwords when describing the agency's campaign last August for Tropicana Twister blended fruit juice. Still, it wouldn't necessarily have been inaccurate hype if the Twister media plan had been described as "synergistic use of convergence."

"It was just a great idea of how to work interactive and general media together to solve a problem," says Theresa Chang, vp/group media director for FCB.

Assigned the task of quickly spiking national interest in Tropicana Twister--and given only a $1 million budget to do so--Chang and her team purchased four national spots on ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The agency then twisted all it could out of this $900,000 media buy by sponsoring a watch-and-win contest on Millionaire's homepage.

"Watch the Tropicana Twister commercial shown during Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on 8/13, 8/15, 8/17 and 8/20," read a promo blurb. It then instructed users to log back onto the site before Aug. 21 and answer two simple questions that anyone who had paid any attention to the TV spot would nail. Those who did respond correctly were entered to win a $10,000 cash prize. The timing, the promotion and the programming selection could not have been better.

While other shows were well into repeats in August, Millionaire was airing original episodes and putting up big ratings. Meanwhile, with much of that audience playing along with the Millionaire broadcast on the show's homepage, plenty of traffic was getting exposed to the Twister sweep stakes banners running all over the site.

Viewers were being steered to the Web site, and the Web site was steering them right back to the TV show. Within those two weeks, 40,433 unique users signed up for the Tropicana contest. Of that, 56 percent requested more information about the product.

Perhaps most important, sales of Tropicana Twister were 25 percent higher after the promotion than before it began, according to Jeff Kjome, senior marketing manager for Tropicana.

"Of course, advertising on such a short time frame, it's impossible to know just how many of those sales were attributable to the campaign," he says. "But we were more than pleasantly surprised by the number of people who logged on to play the game."

"For this particular case, it was just such a good match," adds Chang. "The right spot, the right show, the right time."

For Tropicana, a Bradenton, Florida-based company owned by Pepsi, the results were certainly greater than expected, especially for a national media buy that seemed almost like an afterthought. After all, the juice maker had budgeted Twister for just $5 million in local ad buys in 2000, and nothing was set aside for national.

In December 1999, Tropicana worked with FCB to shoot the inexpensive 30-second commercial featuring a character called Max Armstrong, a Popeye-armed worker on the Twister production line whose sole responsibility is to apply the signature "twist" found on the molded plastic of each Twister bottle.

During the first half of last year, that spot ran in only 10 markets. "We needed to get into some of the key markets and support our product locally," Kjome says of the local buying strategy. "We knew the budget that we had wasn't going to carry us very far nationally."

However, with a Frito-Lay cross-promotion coming up in August, Tropicana officials abruptly changed course, meeting with FCB planners in May to discuss a limited national campaign.

Tropicana had never tried anything like the Internet/TV campaign, and neither had FCB. "Contests and sweep stakes are much more prevalent online than they were a year ago," says Stacy Deziel, senior vp/media director of FCBI, which handles the agency's direct and digital advertising efforts. "At the time we implemented the Twister plan, it hadn't really been done that much before."

When Chang and her team first started conceptualizing the media plan, they weren't necessarily thinking about using the Internet. In fact, the decision to take the media plan inter active actually sprang from Chang's decision to have Deziel sit in on its initial brainstorming sessions.

"For the last couple of years, it's been our mission to create seamlessly integrated direct and digital media capabilities with no walls between the groups," says Rich Gagnon, executive vp/media director for FCB. "Having a mix of digital and direct advertising people working on accounts has really put us in a better position to build brands and think creative ly about media."

Once the watch-and-win-plan was developed, FCB officials decided to leverage media-buying negotiations by implementing the plan with a single media partner. And working with Tropicana's media buying agency, OMD, the programming choice was narrowed to either ABC's Millionaire or the first arc of CBS' Survivor.

Both programs offered original episodes during the summer months. And both shows had strong Internet components.

"We went back and forth between Millionaire and Survivor," Deziel says. "We decided to go with ABC because their Web site was stronger."