Cool Blasts Hitches to Warner Music For Mobile Sweeps, Trivia Fest

Brandweek, July 31, 2000 by Mike Beirne

Looking to leverage a modest budget, Nabisco's LifeSavers unit is building next year's marketing campaign for its fledgling Breath Savers Cool Blasts mints around its Warner Music Group partnership.

With ad and promotional budgets that trade literature pegs at $2 million apiece for 2000 and measured media that came to just $519,000 for this year's first four months, per Competitive Media Reporting, Cool Blasts will look to bar programs, band tours and college music festivals to further align with its 18- to 34-year-old target.

Tightening the association is the Cool Blasts Music Trivia game on candystand.com, which racks up 3.5 million visitors per month.

The online quiz with a saucy cyberhostess who pans "losers" for wrong answers and sometimes sasses"...and I thought you were stupid," after correct ones is linked from Warnerbros.com. The online exposure is worth millions in conventional media buys, said Silvio Bonvini, Nabisco's director of online development and strategic alliances.

Programs under development include sampling events, tour sponsorships and sweeps aimed at driving consumers to play the trivia game.

Print, TV and FSIs, via FCB Worldwide, likely sporting the "Wickedly Intense" tagline, will lure consumers to the game, where top players can win stereos, retro-boxed CD sets from Warner's Rhino label--also linked on candystand.com--and other prizes.

Rhino, which spoofs the LSATs and the GMATs with its Rhino Music Aptitude Test annually searching the world for the ultimate music trivia geek, was looking for an online game presence. The Cool Blasts tie-in fits with Rhino's strategy to display the label's content in trade for brand awareness and traffic from an audience that might not be aware of the music catalog company said David Dorn, vp-media relations/new media.

Cool Blasts, intense mint pellets in a cool blue credit-card-shaped dispenser, reaped $3.3 million in drug, grocery and mass sales, per Information Resources Inc.,since shipping in November. Eventually Ice Breakers gum and mints could join the music partnership.