Outside Scoop

Brandweek, August 21, 2000 by Michael Applebaum

It was a lovefest worthy of the City of Brotherly Love, and one of which Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen would undoubtedly approve. Early on a summer Wednesday downtown Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square was busily being transformed into an "urban pasture," something marketers back at the Burlington, Vt., offices of the quirky ice cream company had dreamt up nine months earlier as a focal event in a summer-long promotion dubbed Stop & Taste the Ice Cream. The concept? Bring fun, relaxation and a taste of Vermont--cows included--to a carefully chosen site in 13 key markets across the country providing mid-day diversions to sweltering urban dwellers in the form of live music, whimsical "stoppisms" and, if all goes as planned, about 1 million free scoops of B&J's new 2Twisted ice cream.

Top it all off with guerrilla sampling at scores of charitable events and radio tie-ins, corporate "work stoppages" conducted by "joy gangs," a buzz-generating hot-air balloon tour and a sweepstakes to win a month-long trip in an RV (and more free ice cream), and you have the makings of one of the more easy-to-swallow promos to come down the pike. And with B&J now a unit of global conglomerate Unilever, pulling off such events may prove increasingly important in retaining the brand's approachable cachet.

Back at Rittenhouse Square, a production crew began laying the groundwork at 6 a.m., scattering freestanding 2Twisted flavor banners and hand-painted signs encouraging people to "Stop and talk to a friend" or "Stop and thank a cow." Tents were pitched at picnic tables where folks could create their own stoppisms on postcards and pieces of fabric to be sewn together into a quilt at tour's end. Cloud- and cow-covered chairs and a stage were set up for live music from college jam band The Big Wu. In the center of it all, a scoop team led by B&J employee Chris Wilkens prepared to deliver samples from one of the company's trademark scoop trucks.

Lines 50-deep began forming at 11 a.m. and didn't let up until the festivities wound down three hours later. Though B&J skews toward men and women age 25 to 44, one would be hard pressed to discern an underlying demographic in this crowd. Kids from a local French study group, parents with their young children and a hodgepodge of adult professionals in button-down shirts all waited patiently in the humid 90-degree heat for their free--and rather generous--scoop of ice cream.

All B&J eyes were on reactions to the recently launched 2Twisted line, combinations of such well-known B&J flavors as Cherry Garcia, Chocolate Fudge Brownie, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch. Mix and match these, and you get such flavors as Half Baked, Jerry's Jubilee and Everything but the..., as well as extensions like Pulp Addiction (chocolate and orange ice cream with orange liqueur) and From Russia with Buzz (coffee ice cream with espresso fudge chips).

For the most part, the urban pasture came off with a minimum of compromises between alternative shtick and corporate pragmatism. The jam band was asked to stop right on schedule so that the sound permit wouldn't expire before celebrity scoopers--Philadelphia Eagles' mascot "Swoop" and local TV news anchorman Vai Sikahema, a former Eagle--showed up. Swoop won over kids by cheating outrageously, scooping with a big plastic shovel. That netted him a second-place finish of $2,500, which he gave to the Eagles Youth Partnership. Sikahema donated his $5,000 first prize to a local church group.

Overseeing things (though happy to oblige on scoop detail) were B&J special events manager Sarah Sparks and promotions manager Peter Nolan, along with Marke Rubenstein, director of promos and pr at Deutsch, N.Y Deutsch had been hired last fall to develop a program that worked on multiple fronts, including driving traffic to 250 franchisee "scoop shops" in the U.S., and then leverage it for all it was worth.

"When you don't do multimillion-dollar ad campaigns on radio and TV, you have to come up with something that has promotional value built into it," said chief marketing officer Michael Sands, who had previously worked with Deutsch on promos when he marketed Snapple at Triarc. "Our strength has always been one-to-one consumer contact and sampling. Deutsch had done these kinds of tours before and understood the pr value of the program."

In fact, Deutsch was in the midst of preparing for a huge, 33-city Snapple tour in 2000 when it signed on with B&J. Out of a healthy give-and-take emerged the plan to play off the adage, "Stop and smell the roses," which had grown out of earlier brainstorming sessions with account planners at agency McKinney & Silver, Raleigh, N.C. As for the hot-air balloon, that was something "Ben Cohen had always wanted to do," said Sands.

The key criterion: "We didn't want anything too commercial, which is why we rejected outsourcing of spokespeople or volunteers," said Sands." Part of the reason for bringing in Deutsch was to determine whether our corporate culture, which is definitely not traditional, would make sense outside Ben & Jerry's...They insisted we stay true to ourselves."