Trident Chewing Gum has an on-pack promotion to win festival tickets every week. They call it the Perpetual Festival: the ultimate gateway to the best festivals and parties worldwide. Firstly, I have to log onto tridentgum.co.uk. This is an impressive looking bit of online marketing, with a blog, a link to a Facebook page (with 21,728 fans) and a Twitter page (with 528 followers). They’re all run by one person – XFM presenter Katie Parsons – which is a great  way to connect with consumers. She is attending each of the 30 festivals around the world, communicating via Twitter, Facebook and Blogspot as she goes. Continue reading ‘Win Festival Tickets with Trident Chewing Gum’

I saw Kronenbourg’s inspired ‘Slow the pace’ TV advert tonight featuring Motorhead performing a slow acoustic version of Ace of Spades in what looks like a French bar, looking every inch like it was filmed in Louisiana. Actually, it was filmed in LA, at Lemmy’s favourite bar, The Rainbow.

The advertising agency BBH have outdone themselves as it really stood out as the best piece of television advertising this week. I spoke to my boys about Motorhead and what a great rock band they are, so it was really targeted well to get 35-49 year old male lager drinkers re-connecting with an iconic band, and by association with the Kronenbourg beer brand. What was interesting for me was the way it all tied together in social media. I logged on to Facebook tonight to find my ever on-the-ball friend Stuart Curran posting a comment and a link to the YouTube video which led me to some on-set footage featured on Kronenbourg’s YouTube channel.

From there I was taken to Kronenbourg’s website where I the actual mp3 was available as a free download, meaning it will be on my iPod when I go back to work next week. I couldn’t ‘like’ the song on iTunes Ping because “it’s not currently offered in the iTunes store”

The campaign works well for Motorhead’s marketing strategy too, as it coincides with Lemmy’s London Film Festival documentary and the start of an international Motorhead tour. An astonishingly well-executed advertising campaign that seamlessly integrates Digital, achieving well-deserved coverage across the web.

We had the in-laws to stay recently, and they brought their own Twinings English Breakfast tea. I noticed this on-pack ‘a little treat’ promotion so I thought I’d give it a go. Clearly the promotion has been running for some time because some of the offers closed in June. I’d not noticed it in the supermarkets though. I go to www.twiningstreats.com and discover that this is a Coinks promotion. Continue reading ‘Twinings – a Little Treat’

The packaging on Dorset Cereals is gorgeous; the packs really look unusual next to all the other brightly-coloured breakfast cereals in the supermarket. The promotion itself is an Instant Win with a gypsy caravan as a prize. What a great prize idea, and perfect for the brand.

The mechanic involves going  online, entering your unique code, email and full address. Entry was painless and fast, the site looked great and was well coded too. I didn’t win the caravan, but I entered a couple more competitions whilst I was on the site: a Spin the Bottle game and a draw for a holiday in Norfolk. Dorset Cereals have good Facebook and Twitter presences too. Their agency, Big Fish, is doing a great job with this brand.

Yeo Valley are running 2 competitions on their organic probiotic yogurt packs. The first involves going online and voting for your favourite rapping farmer. There’s no purchase required for this one. The second is a text-to-win, using a promotional code from the pack.

For the online competition, Yeo Valley are collecting Name, Email and age. I submit but get an unhelpful error message: “There has been an error. Please also make sure you don’t sign up twice with the same email address.” I’m in Chrome so I switch to Firefox. Same problem. I change my email, but I still get the error. So I have to give up.

Next I try the text-to-win. This works, but I get a text message back instantly to tell me that I haven’t won.

Another chance to try a product I’ve never bought before. Who doesn’t like candlelight, especially in this gloomy weather? Glade’s marketing team have created an on-pack/online promotion to win a family trip to Lapland every week this winter. The instructions say “To discover instantly if you are a winner, simply go to www.glade.co.uk or www.glade.ie before the 31st December 2010 and type in your name, email address and the barcode found on this pack.” Continue reading ‘Glade – win a family trip to Lapland’

Printed books aren’t high on my ‘must have’ list, but I’m not the target market for Galaxy chocolate. Inside the pack I found my ‘unique indulgent code’ and the instructions to ‘simply log on to www.galaxybookclub.co.uk‘.

I was pretty surprised to be asked my age to enter this promotion. You have to be over 16 to enter – I wonder why. After this I arrived at the entry page. Despite the on-pack instructions there was no ‘log on’ requirement, but bizarrely I was asked to select a ‘prefix’ and then my promotional code. All I had was my indulgent code, so I hoped this was the same thing.  The ‘prefix’ was pretty bizarre though. The choices were “adored, beauty, candle, caress, creamy, devour, divine, dreamy, enrich, escape, galaxy, gently, glossy, hidden, kisses, linger, lovely, loving, luxury, melted, moment, myselpamper, poetry, pretty, purity, reward, ripple, ritual, savour, secret, seduce, senses, shared, silken, slowly, smooth, soften, softly, subtle, tempts, tender, unfold, unwind, unwrap, valued, velvet, virtue, wishes, wonder.” What did they mean and how was someone supposed to choose? Continue reading ‘Galaxy: 1 million books to be won’

Diminished Reality video demonstration by Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll from the Ilmenau University of Technology. The software can remove objects from live video in 40ms per frame.

It was introduced at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.

This is a great promotion from Beck’s, and I think their target market will go for it in a big way. A single music track costs 99p on iTunes, and there’s a free track with every bottle. The on-pack instructions say ‘Enter the code on the reverse of this label at www.becks.co.uk to download a song of your choice’.

After giving my age, which is just a whisker over 18, I’m taken to www.becksmusicexperience.co.uk. This then leads me to Play.com. As there’s no mention of the promotion on Play.com, it’s not really clear what I have to do next, but in the absence of other information, I browse to a track that I want.

In my case it’s Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” (featuring one of my favourite artists, Kate Bush). I have to create an account, along with entering my credit card number, which will put a lot of people off. When I get to the checkout, I click on the ‘voucher code’ button and enter the code from the bottle of Beck’s, even though there are no specific instructions to do this. Luckily, it works, and my track is reduced to zero cost.

Now, this isn’t obvious and will confuse some people, but it’s nowhere near as confusing as the Casillero Del Diablo Free Audio Books or Yazoo Free Music promotions. Considering a 15-pack of 275ml Beck’s Costs £9 from Asda, and this would give you £14.85 worth of music tracks, it’s an amazing offer and one that I’ll be taking full advantage of!

There’s no need to go to the Beck’s microsite by the way. Just go straight to Play.com to redeem your codes.

Yazoo chocolate milk is offering free music downloads on its 4-packs. The instructions say ‘Choose from 10 million songs from yazoo.co.uk‘. But what a strange screen is presented when I go there! It seriously is the height of amateurishness. This is the screen that IIS7 – Microsoft’s web server software – shows when a domain hasn’t been set up yet. Pretty unbelievable. Not only that the System Administrator would do it, but that they’d print the URL on a pack and not even test it… this is a 5 minute job to fix. The URL they expect the consumer to go to is www.yazoo.co.uk. [21 Oct 2010 update: this is now fixed - yazoo.co.uk goes to the correct place] Continue reading ‘Yazoo – Free Music Download’