Crest Gets Hired
By Maggie Rauch
How reality TV is helping brands reach consumers
NOVEMBER 01, 2004 - -- When two teams of young businesspeople faced off to see who could better promote a new Crest product on NBC's hit show The Apprentice 2 this fall, the Apex team was not the only winner. Crest also came out ahead, by tying its Product Placement opportunity on the show to a major online contest and giveaway.
The Apprentice and Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy are just two of many TV shows that combat viewers' growing ability to tune out traditional commercials by scripting products into the program. But the Crest campaign, by integrating an interactive promotion, puts a new spin on this marketing vehicle.
In the episode, the teams of competitors vying to work for Donald Trump pushed Crest Whitening Expressions Refreshing Vanilla Mint at two Manhattan parks. Near the end of the show, a 15-second spot urged viewers to go to www.Crest.com and enter an essay contest. They were asked to describe, in 100 words, how they would have promoted the new product. The contest's grand prize is the chance to attend the taping of the final live episode in December and spend a night in a Trump hotel; every entrant received a product sample.
"This is the first time we've done a promo like this with a TV show," says Josh Linkner, CEO of ePrize, the Farmington Hills, Michigan, company that assisted on the campaign. "It allowed Crest to have a more active engagement with the sponsorship. They got a lot of extra mileage beyond the one-hour show."
Networks and marketers are still working to develop appropriate pricing for ad packages that include Product Placement. In this case, Crest bought the commercial time first and its public relations firm paid a separate sum for the Product Placement.
"There are very few standards for embedded advertising," says Hamet Watt, CEO of NextMedium, a Los Angeles affiliate of Nielsen Media Research (like Incentive, a VNU property). "We are looking for more clear ways to quantify its value, and interactivity is one of the things we're looking at."
The Crest/Apprentice campaign, by linking Product Placement to an active promotion, addresses this challenge of tracking the impact of a brand's on-air presence.
"The online contest gives the campaign a built-in measurability," says Lucian James, president of Agenda, a San Francisco marketing firm. In this case, the measured data was very positive for Crest. Procter & Gamble reported 4.7 million hits to the Crest Web site in the first five days after the show, the highest level of interest in a product launch in the company's history.
With those kinds of results, it's no surprise to hear James say he expects to see similar initiatives in the near future.
"This worked well because the show is about marketing," he says. "But if the product is clumsily integrated, and it becomes clear that the brand itself is driving the story, viewers will tune out."