Advertising: The Tupperware Party Moves to Social Media

Next week, the Tupperware Brands Corporation plans to significantly increase its presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter, which more consumers are using as ways to connect with marketers as well as one another.

The goal is to find “more disruptive methods” to dispel perceptions that “we are your mother’s Tupperware,” said Rick Goings, chairman and chief executive of Tupperware Brands in Orlando, Fla., as the company seeks more consumers to buy — and sell — its products like containers, cutlery and cookware.

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A Facebook page devoted to a Tupperware campaign that carries the theme “Chain of confidence” will get more rich content like video clips featuring women of achievement who will be presented as “confidence counselors.” The page will also offer blog posts, articles, motivational tips and inspirational quotations.

Tupperware is to join the ranks of marketers seeking to encourage Facebook users to say they “like” corporate pages by enlisting the singer Kelly Clarkson to lead an initiative that will promise a donation of a dollar to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America for each new “like” clicked for the revamped Facebook page.

And Tupperware will add an account on Twitter devoted to the confidence campaign, supplementing others used by the company’s United States sales force, marketing arm and corporate public relations department. Comments on Twitter related to the campaign are all to be identified with an “official” hash tag, #Confidence.

“It’s time to take it up to the next level,” Mr. Goings said of the company’s social media efforts.

Tupperware Brands has long believed in the power of social networking, he added, because recommendations about a brand or product “from someone you have confidence in is the absolutely best form” of marketing.

Underlining that, Tupperware Brands runs no traditional advertising, preferring to spend its marketing dollars on public relations, events, celebrity endorsers and promotions.

For instance, the chef Michael White took part in March in a two-day “pop-up” restaurant dubbed the Tupper Club. And Ms. Clarkson is to perform later this month at a concert, called Confide and Conquer, that will be sponsored by Tupperware in New York.

For a marketer like Tupperware Brands that specializes in direct selling, “the only thing advertising does is it makes your sales force feel supported,” Mr. Goings said, but that can also be accomplished “when you offer them incentives and trips.”

Elinor Steele, vice president for global communications and public relations at Tupperware Brands, characterized the company’s current status in social media this way: “We’ve kind of stuck our toe in the water, dabbling in Facebook and Twitter in a small way.”

“Now, we’re getting serious about it,” Ms. Steele said, “employing some more sophisticated programs and social media strategies” that are meant to create “an interactive community and destination” for people who sell Tupperware, buy Tupperware or want to become part of the sales force. “It’s about moving from brand awareness to helping people become brand advocates,” she added.

Most mainstream marketers are using social media to augment conventional kinds of advertising rather than replacing them. Either way, Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are becoming selling channels alongside legacy media like television and newspapers.

Social media “allow people to have a say in a brand,” said Peter Nicholson, creative officer at JWT New York, part of the JWT unit of WPP, and “the power of consumers engaging with a brand with real-time connections” can make a big difference.

The agency of record for Tupperware Brands is Maloney & Fox in New York, a division of Waggener Edstrom that is handling social media, events and even merchandise like a line of Confidence apparel, including T-shirts and scarves, that is to be sold on the Chain of Confidence Facebook page.

Using social media can help marketers “reach out to a younger demographic in a more interesting and dynamic way,” said Julie Levinthal, who is the program lead for this Tupperware Brands initiative at Maloney & Fox. That is important as Tupperware introduces itself to women who may not have ever attended a Tupperware party or burped one of its signature containers.

“We’re calling it the ‘cool-ification’ of the brand,” Ms. Levinthal said, intended to counter the image that Tupperware is “this June Cleaver, 1950s brand, which it’s not.”

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Will Wheeler, the social media lead at Maloney & Fox, said the endorsers who will appear on Facebook and Twitter for Tupperware were selected because of their influence in social media.

The initial so-called confidence counselors taking part in the campaign are Beverly Bond, a D.J. who founded an organization named Black Girls Rock, and Abby Zeichner, a designer who specializes in plus-size clothing.

Their videos that are to be on the revamped Facebook page do not take hard-sell tacks. In one clip, Ms. Zeichner uses the phrase “Tupperware parties” in passing. In another clip, Ms. Bond does not mention Tupperware at all.

“Beverly’s mom has some Tupperware,” Ms. Levinthal said, but Ms. Bond did not until she received cookware from Tupperware Brands.

“Beverly didn’t know when we sent her the thousand-dollar Chef Series that Tupperware makes these stainless steel pots and pans,” Ms. Levinthal said.

Changing brand perceptions, one pot (or pan) at a time.

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Advertising: The Tupperware Party Moves to Social Media

Next week, the Tupperware Brands Corporation plans to significantly increase its presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter, which more consumers are using as ways to connect with marketers as well as one another.

The goal is to find “more disruptive methods” to dispel perceptions that “we are your mother’s Tupperware,” said Rick Goings, chairman and chief executive of Tupperware Brands in Orlando, Fla., as the company seeks more consumers to buy — and sell — its products like containers, cutlery and cookware.

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A Facebook page devoted to a Tupperware campaign that carries the theme “Chain of confidence” will get more rich content like video clips featuring women of achievement who will be presented as “confidence counselors.” The page will also offer blog posts, articles, motivational tips and inspirational quotations.

Tupperware is to join the ranks of marketers seeking to encourage Facebook users to say they “like” corporate pages by enlisting the singer Kelly Clarkson to lead an initiative that will promise a donation of a dollar to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America for each new “like” clicked for the revamped Facebook page.

And Tupperware will add an account on Twitter devoted to the confidence campaign, supplementing others used by the company’s United States sales force, marketing arm and corporate public relations department. Comments on Twitter related to the campaign are all to be identified with an “official” hash tag, #Confidence.

“It’s time to take it up to the next level,” Mr. Goings said of the company’s social media efforts.

Tupperware Brands has long believed in the power of social networking, he added, because recommendations about a brand or product “from someone you have confidence in is the absolutely best form” of marketing.

Underlining that, Tupperware Brands runs no traditional advertising, preferring to spend its marketing dollars on public relations, events, celebrity endorsers and promotions.

For instance, the chef Michael White took part in March in a two-day “pop-up” restaurant dubbed the Tupper Club. And Ms. Clarkson is to perform later this month at a concert, called Confide and Conquer, that will be sponsored by Tupperware in New York.

For a marketer like Tupperware Brands that specializes in direct selling, “the only thing advertising does is it makes your sales force feel supported,” Mr. Goings said, but that can also be accomplished “when you offer them incentives and trips.”

Elinor Steele, vice president for global communications and public relations at Tupperware Brands, characterized the company’s current status in social media this way: “We’ve kind of stuck our toe in the water, dabbling in Facebook and Twitter in a small way.”

“Now, we’re getting serious about it,” Ms. Steele said, “employing some more sophisticated programs and social media strategies” that are meant to create “an interactive community and destination” for people who sell Tupperware, buy Tupperware or want to become part of the sales force. “It’s about moving from brand awareness to helping people become brand advocates,” she added.

Most mainstream marketers are using social media to augment conventional kinds of advertising rather than replacing them. Either way, Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are becoming selling channels alongside legacy media like television and newspapers.

Social media “allow people to have a say in a brand,” said Peter Nicholson, creative officer at JWT New York, part of the JWT unit of WPP, and “the power of consumers engaging with a brand with real-time connections” can make a big difference.

The agency of record for Tupperware Brands is Maloney & Fox in New York, a division of Waggener Edstrom that is handling social media, events and even merchandise like a line of Confidence apparel, including T-shirts and scarves, that is to be sold on the Chain of Confidence Facebook page.

Using social media can help marketers “reach out to a younger demographic in a more interesting and dynamic way,” said Julie Levinthal, who is the program lead for this Tupperware Brands initiative at Maloney & Fox. That is important as Tupperware introduces itself to women who may not have ever attended a Tupperware party or burped one of its signature containers.

“We’re calling it the ‘cool-ification’ of the brand,” Ms. Levinthal said, intended to counter the image that Tupperware is “this June Cleaver, 1950s brand, which it’s not.”

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Will Wheeler, the social media lead at Maloney & Fox, said the endorsers who will appear on Facebook and Twitter for Tupperware were selected because of their influence in social media.

The initial so-called confidence counselors taking part in the campaign are Beverly Bond, a D.J. who founded an organization named Black Girls Rock, and Abby Zeichner, a designer who specializes in plus-size clothing.

Their videos that are to be on the revamped Facebook page do not take hard-sell tacks. In one clip, Ms. Zeichner uses the phrase “Tupperware parties” in passing. In another clip, Ms. Bond does not mention Tupperware at all.

“Beverly’s mom has some Tupperware,” Ms. Levinthal said, but Ms. Bond did not until she received cookware from Tupperware Brands.

“Beverly didn’t know when we sent her the thousand-dollar Chef Series that Tupperware makes these stainless steel pots and pans,” Ms. Levinthal said.

Changing brand perceptions, one pot (or pan) at a time.

 

Advertising: Casting Yourself in a Wild, Forgotten Night

Now, in a Web promotion reminiscent of the movie, Hotels.com is encouraging people to cast themselves in their own hotel misadventures by substituting their faces and the faces of friends for those of actors in provocative videos.

On a site for the campaign, TripYourFace.com, a user can upload a photo from a Facebook profile and profile photos of up to three friends. After choosing the actors to superimpose the faces onto, users crop uploaded faces, adjusting brightness and color to match those of the actors, and then are taken to a screen that features a hotel room in New York, Las Vegas or Paris.

As in “The Hangover,” each features a tableau of unconscious characters in a room in disarray. In Paris, for example, feathers are strewn all over a room where four blindfolded musicians, in formal attire, are slumped over their instruments, a fencer in a white outfit and mask is asleep in a chair, and Dennis Rodman, the retired basketball player, is passed out shirtless in a bed along with two lingerie-clad women.

Clicking one of three play buttons in the scene prompts a video “flashback” that helps piece together the scene: for Paris, one clip shows the two women in a pillow fight, then tearing off Mr. Rodman’s shirt as he sprays the room with Champagne.

But with the face substitutions, one actress ripping off Mr. Rodman’s shirt can instead be a Facebook user’s friend. And a segment of the video, starring that unwitting friend, can be posted directly to her Facebook profile, which Hotels.com of course hopes will prompt her to visit the Trip Your Face site and subsequently engage other friends in the campaign.

The videos lack the verisimilitude of, say, the special effects that substituted the face of Natalie Portman for that of a professional ballerina in some dancing sequences in “The Black Swan.” But it is more technologically sophisticated than earlier campaigns in which consumers uploaded their faces into two-dimensional situations like Elf Yourself, a viral OfficeMax campaign first executed during the holiday season in 2006, which was two-dimensional and low-tech, resembling “South Park.”

The Hotels.com campaign is by Y&R Chicago, part of Young & Rubicam, with the production company B-Reel. The Las Vegas hotel room situation features another celebrity, the rapper Vanilla Ice, while the New York option has no celebrities.

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“We wanted to produce something where people could put their faces into live action, which I don’t think has been done in a campaign before, and it certainly hasn’t been done in our category,” said Vic Walia, senior director for North America brand advertising at Hotels.com, which is owned by Expedia.

“Since they are a digital company and digital brand it’s important for them to invest in new and emerging technology, not just for the e-commerce site but also for the way in which they market and brand themselves,” said Matthew Witt, director of digital production at Young & Rubicam.

The campaign aligns with how people use Facebook, said Sonya Grewal, a vice president and creative director at Y&R Chicago.

“People post vacation photos on Facebook, so we thought of Facebook as kind of helping us seize this idea,” Ms. Grewal said. “We thought, ‘How cool would it be if you created these videos that happened in hotel rooms, and you are a part of it and so are your friends?’?”

While traffic for the online travel agent category was down 9 percent in March compared with a year ago, according to comScore, Hotels.com traffic rose 9 percent, to 4.9 million unique visitors.

Hotels.com, which declined to reveal the budget for the new campaign, has cut ad spending in each of the last three years, sliding to $31.4 million in 2010 from $70.5 million in 2007, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP.

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After visiting a preview version of the site, Brian Morrissey, editor in chief of Digiday, an online publication that covers digital marketing and media, said it lacked a critical element of successful campaigns like Elf Yourself: simplicity.

Because users are prompted to make numerous cropping, lighting and color adjustments, it can take about five minutes to upload a single photograph, with that time multiplied by the number of friends the user adds. In all, the process can entail dozens of mouse clicks.

“Every click comes with a price, and I expect they’re going to have a very high drop-off rate,” Mr. Morrissey said, referring to users who may give up and leave the site. “If you’re going to ask someone to go through all those steps, the payoff better be huge.”

For his part, Mr. Morrissey was underwhelmed.

“To me the experience was like a long walk for a small beer,” he said.

Mr. Walia, of Hotels.com, said many users would come to the site having already seen their faces in a video shared by friends through Facebook and, because they “know what the payoff is,” will navigate through the uploading process willingly.

“This is taking it up a notch and saying we can make this look more realistic and more lifelike,” Mr. Walia said. “The bar is higher now, and consumers are more and more tech-savvy and we need to give them credit in that area.”

 

Advertising: Lenovo Aims a Campaign at the Apple Crowd

That’s why the Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo, largely unknown to the average American consumer, is trying to get its products into the hands of the coveted 18- to 25-year-old Apple generation, which has been raised on all things iPod and iPad.

“The most difficult thing in marketing and branding is trying to change the perception,” said David Roman, the company’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer, “but Lenovo had very little recognition in the consumer space.”

It’s a tall order, but in January, Lenovo partnered with Saatchi & Saatchi, part of the Publicis Groupe and the company’s agency of record, to work on a new advertising effort. The resulting campaign, which will begin in May, is estimated to cost $100 million.

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The campaign’s focus is action, specifically the idea that Lenovo products are “for those who do.” One 30-second television spot shows a blinking cursor on a computer screen, the flame from a gas stove being turned on and a pencil being sharpened.

“The world won’t move forward by itself,” says a narrator. The world needs “the people who do. The ones who tinker, who build, who create.”

The campaign portrays these “doers” as people who are known for doing something extraordinary. Print ads feature a new Lenovo laptop in a variety of situations, including as part of the dashboard of a car outfitted with gadgets for a storm chaser, and harnessed to the space between the handlebars on a motorcycle as it is driven through a desert.

The tagline on the ads reads, “We make the tools. You make them do.” A digital billboard installation shows a 360-degree moving image of the motorcycle laptop contraption and provides technical details highlighting the laptop’s computing power.

To help develop the creative elements of the new campaign, Saatchi & Saatchi conducted research with 18- to 25-year-olds and learned that they were ambitious and optimistic, said Claudine Cheever, the agency’s chief strategy officer. The campaign was designed to embody the ideals of pragmatism, authenticity and the act of getting things done.

But aren’t millennials more captivated by design and coolness than pragmatic electronics? Not according to Ms. Cheever, who said technology was “not just a badge, it’s a tool.”

The advertising initiative includes digital banner ads and rich media ads on the Web, television spots, digital billboards and a smattering of print ads. The ads will run on cable outlets like ESPN, Bravo and MTV, and on technology Web sites like CNet.com. Outdoor advertising has begun in nine cities, including New York, Atlanta and San Francisco.

Lenovo’s last consumer campaign, called “Ideas Anywhere,” was tied to the company’s sponsorship of the Beijing Olympics and ran from August 2008 to November 2009.

Before heading out into the real world, the company brought the message in-house and rallied employees with new business cards, T-shirts, building signs and new e-mail signatures. The internal campaign events took place in April in Lenovo’s offices in Madrid and Raleigh, N.C., and was an extension of a employee training program called “The Lenovo Way,” which began in 2009.

Leaving no stone unturned, Lenovo also rebranded the packaging for its products and the kiosks it takes to trade shows.

One thing Lenovo already had going for it in the consumer brand space was its I.B.M. ThinkPad brand.

But Lenovo had to take that brand recognition and make it “relevant to a broader consumer base,” Ms. Cheever said. “How do you take the ThinkPad equity and mine that for something a 25-year-old is going to relate to?”

The company purchased the I.B.M. PC division in 2005, and has since begun manufacturing smartphones in China. It announced a hybrid tablet notebook, the IdeaPad U1, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The ad campaign will feature new products, including the Lenovo ThinkPad X1, a slim laptop aimed to compete with the MacBook Air laptop.

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The campaign also includes various media partnerships, including one with the youth-oriented nonprofit organization DoSomething.org. The co-branded campaign will begin this summer and will encourage teams of people under 25 to take on projects to improve their communities. The winning teams will be eligible to win Lenovo products.

Lenovo’s Mexico office is also forging a media partnership with MTV Mexico to create a new reality show Web series and co-branding opportunities to aim at the youth market in that region. “I don’t believe you can have a technology brand that doesn’t come from the youth market today.” Mr. Roman said.

 

Advertising: Tales of Reading in Reintroducing a Color Device

Make that Nook Color, the e-reading tablet that Barnes & Noble is hoping to reintroduce to consumers in an advertising campaign that begins on Monday.

In gently singsong language that evokes Dr. Seuss — sure enough, “The Cat in the Hat” makes a brief appearance later in the ad — a commercial makes a general pitch for reading as it depicts people, old and young, utterly absorbed in their books while the world goes on around them.

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A series of dreamy sequences shows a dark-haired boy in a hoodie sweatshirt, reading in a park and blissfully paying no attention as two other boys and a dog noisily brush past him. A young girl sits cross-legged on a dining-room rug, a Nook in her lap, as she absentmindedly tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. A couple is stretched out in bed, locked in their own worlds, she with a Nook and he with a book. Four people sit, still as statues, reading, on the stairs of a public building as passers-by rush down the steps.

One print ad bears the tagline “Read Forever,” with a picture of a small boy curled up on a window seat gazing at the screen on his Nook.

The hopeful message? Reading is changing, but it’s not going away.

There are no Barnes & Noble stores in the ads, a nod to the transformation that is under way in the publishing industry. As e-books have taken off, foot traffic in brick-and-mortar stores has decreased, a sure sign that more consumers are doing their book-shopping from home. (Or wherever they and their e-readers happen to be at the moment.)

Barnes & Noble, which operates the nation’s largest chain of bookstores, is hoping many of those purchases will happen on the Nook Color, the $249 tablet that the company introduced last year as an addition to its original Nook, a black-and-white reader whose versions are currently priced at $149 and $199.

There are dozens of e-readers and tablets on the market, and many more are expected to arrive this year. But the most prominent players for devices that focus on reading e-books are Barnes & Noble and Amazon, with its popular Kindle.

Amazon still has a significantly larger share of the e-reading market, but Barnes & Noble has surprised many people in the industry with the gains it has made with its Nook, and the two retailers are locked in a battle for e-reading customers.

Barnes & Noble spent more than $30 million on advertising in 2010 but was seriously outgunned by Amazon, which spent more than $150 million, according to Kantar Media, which tracks advertising spending.

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Last year, an initial campaign to introduce the Nook Color opened on a picture of a Barnes & Noble store, the camera zooming through the entrance and landing on a Nook Color, while Sarah Jessica Parker narrated the voice-over.

This campaign, which was created by Mullen in Boston, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, was an effort to attach some emotional power to reading and to the Barnes & Noble brand. Mullen was hired as Barnes & Noble’s new agency of record in February.

“We really wanted to reach out to all the readers and get the message out about how wonderful reading is,” said Sasha Norkin, the vice president for digital and channel marketing for BN.com. “The world changes, technology changes, but people love to read, and we’re giving them the best way to read.”

The Nook was first introduced in 2009, two years after Amazon began selling its Kindle. Last year, Barnes & Noble added the Nook Color, a device featuring a seven-inch screen with a backlit LCD display, suitable for reading books, magazines and newspapers, as well as browsing the Web, playing games and listening to music.

The first commercial in the campaign will run on Monday, and a longer 60-second spot will run during “American Idol” on Thursday. Print ads will run in The New York Times and USA Today. On the company’s Facebook page, users will be invited to share their feelings about reading.

Barnes & Noble declined to disclose the total spending on the campaign.

To add authenticity, casting agents were dispatched to find people reading in public places like bus stops and cafes. Some people were recruited to do voice-overs and appear in the commercial, which was shot in naturally lighted locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They eventually numbered more than half of the people on screen, while the rest were actors.

“It transcended age, race, gender,” said Tim Vaccarino, the group creative director for Mullen. “We wanted to find a collection of people who represented this community of readers.”

 

Advertising: SnackWell’s Nudges Up the Portion Pack

In 1995, sales reached about $490 million, and the brand topped both the cookie and cracker categories — but then SnackWell’s got an object lesson in how the cookie crumbles. Competing brands, which had dabbled mostly in sugar-free products to attract dieters, introduced their own successful fat-reduced temptations, and SnackWell’s sales plummeted.

Revenue for SnackWell’s was $32.3 million in the 52 weeks that ended March 20, a drop of 8.6 percent from the previous year, according to SymphonyIRI Group, whose totals do not include Wal-Mart. Advertising for the brand, which totaled an estimated $60 million in 1998, ceased after 2005 as parent company Kraft aggressively marketed its 2004 introduction of another craze for dieters: the 100-calorie pack.

Now, in what Kraft marketers are calling a reintroduction of SnackWell’s, the brand has new products, and a new advertising campaign aimed at weight-conscious women.

The first print ad in the campaign features a closely cropped photograph of a pair of stiletto-heeled black leather boots with the new slogan for the brand, “Be bad. Snack well.” The ad, by McGarryBowen, New York, a unit of Dentsu, introduces Fudge Drizzled Caramel Popcorn, and a new approach for the brand: portion control.

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“Deliciously indulgent, perfectly portioned,” says the new ad, which is scheduled to begin appearing Friday in magazines, including People, Cosmopolitan and Glamour. “At 130 calories, they let you be bad, and still be good.”

SnackWell’s will continue to sell in two older varieties, Devil’s Food Cookie Cakes and Crème Sandwich Cookies, in standard packaging. But in a new twist on premeasured portions, the brand is nibbling past the common 100-calorie limit. Another popcorn snack with white chocolate is also packaged in 130-calorie portions and two other varieties, Fudge Crème Brownie Bites and Rich Vanilla Crème Brownie Bites, contain 150 calories in a portion.

“There is a group of women out there who struggle with temptation and want responsible alternatives that allow them to really enjoy sweets, but with an off switch because they have a difficult time stopping,” said Steve Siegal, a senior brand manager for SnackWell’s, who added that sometimes the cutoff should exceed 100 calories.

“When it comes to portion control, consumers really want satiating products, and at the end of the day they don’t want to feel deprived,” Mr. Siegal said. “They will have a few more calories if it satisfies their sweet craving.”

Women are far more interested in snacks and drinks sold in portion-controlled packages, with 19 percent of women saying they buy such products, compared with 8 percent of men, according Mintel, a market research firm. But prepackaged portions are often too small, in the opinion of 25 percent of men and 20 percent of women.

Brian Wansink, who wrote “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” said in a telephone interview that in his research, when experiment subjects were presented with 100-calorie packs, about 70 percent were satisfied with just one, while the remainder helped themselves to seconds or thirds.

In another experiment by Dr. Wansink, who directs the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, participants who had eaten at around noon were gathered for snacks of either chocolate or cheese and crackers between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. With no inkling that their intake was being monitored, “most people stopped between the 170- to 190-calorie mark,” said Dr. Wansink. Applying that to SnackWell’s 130- to 150-calorie portions, “that might present a happy medium” because it is midway between 100 calories and what seems to be a natural point of satiation, he said.

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But SnackWell’s two popcorn snacks that combine sweet and salty flavors could undermine “sensory-specific satiety,” the term for the feeling of having had enough of a certain flavor, he said.

“Sensory-specific satiety causes you to get bored if you just eat potato chips, but if you take a break from potato chips and then eat chocolate, you want more potato chips again,” said Dr. Wansink.

Sweet-and-salty snacks “are very tasty, but I could see this combination of flavors triggering a gigantic craving for more than just 130 calories of it,” he said.

Four varieties that had been sold under the Nabisco 100 Calorie Packs label — Petites Fudge, Petites Mint Fudge, Fudge Drizzled Chocolate Chip Cookies and Fudge Drizzled Double Chocolate Chip Cookies — will now instead be sold under the SnackWell’s label (still in 100-calorie portions.) All of the new SnackWell’s products have a suggested retail price of $3.19 for a box of five servings.

The brand declined to reveal what it will spend on the new campaign, except that it’s “a significant investment in the millions of dollars,” Mr. Siegal said.

As for why Kraft elected to introduce the products and approach under a brand it had not advertised in five years, rather than a new one, Mr. Siegel said that 85 percent of consumers still report being familiar with SnackWell’s.

“A lot of snacking companies would die to have 85 percent brand recognition for a brand that has stood for better-for-you indulgent snacking,” Mr. Siegal said. “It’s been a long time since the brand was out there in a big way, but this really is all about a new attitude and edge for the brand.”

 

Advertising: Checkout Coupon Company Joins Boom in Online Discount Offers

The Catalina Marketing Corporation is introducing Coupon Network by Catalina, to be found online at Couponnetwork.com. Advertisers with offers on the Web site include pantry mainstays like Campbell Soup, General Mills, Kellogg, Kraft Foods, Nestlé, Reckitt Benckiser and Unilever.

There are also some unexpected offers on Couponnetwork.com, among them savings on toys from the Fisher-Price division of Mattel and light bulbs from General Electric.

Coupon Network is an addition to the decades-old businesses that Catalina calls shopper-driven marketing, intended to help advertisers more efficiently and effectively reach target audiences. Catalina estimates that it distributes more than $6.5 billion in coupons to shoppers each year through its printers at store checkout counters.

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The checkout coupons provided by Catalina compete for consumer favor with coupons in free-standing inserts, which are the coupon booklets carried in Sunday newspapers; coupons in magazines and so-called penny-saver publications; and coupons distributed by direct mail.

Catalina is so well known for checkout coupons that many devoted couponers, as avid discount-seekers refer to themselves, call the offers “Catalinas.” There are few higher accolades in marketing than a brand becoming synonymous with a product, whether it is Band-Aid, Kleenex or Q-Tip.

Still, the online coupon field is alluring, because it is booming. Two factors are feeding its growth.

One is the increasing influence of the Internet in everyday life. Not only are there printers in millions of homes, readily printing out coupons from Web sites, but there is also the phenomenon of social daily-deal coupons from companies like Groupon and LivingSocial.

The other factor benefiting online coupons is the recent bumpy economy. Coupon redemption rates had been falling for decades until the recent recession.

Although online coupons account for only 1 percent of all coupons distributed, they account for about 10 percent of all coupons redeemed, said Susan Gear, group vice president for digital at Catalina in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Ms. Gear also noted that consumers “can print out coupons for exactly the products they want,” which adds to their appeal.

For some time, Ms. Gear said, Catalina had been considering an entry into the online coupon realm, joining Web sites like Coolsavings.com, Coupons.com, Couponmom.com, Redplum.com and Smartsource.com.

The idea gathered momentum after Catalina took technological steps in the last couple of years that included offering coupons by mobile e-mail, handling Target’s coupons section on its Web site and acquiring E-centives, an Internet coupon company.

In developing the Web site, Catalina consulted with advertisers, retailers and bloggers, among them the “Super-Coupon Queen,” Jill Cataldo.

“They’ve got a lot of great printable coupons” on Couponnetwork.com, said Ms. Cataldo, of Huntley, Ill., who has a Web site, Jillcataldo.com, and writes “Super-Couponing Tips,” a nationally syndicated column.

Coupon Network “is doing a good job giving us coupons we might not have seen before and are pretty relevant to what I buy,” she added.

Those are welcome words to an advertiser like Karl Schmidt, director for promotional marketing at General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn. “We’ve been going digital with print-at-home coupons since tests in 2001,” he said.

“In the early days of print-at-home, six, seven years ago, there were issues with redemption,” Mr. Schmidt said, as retailers declined to accept them. As that largely disappeared, digital coupons have become “a significant percentage of our spending,” he added.

“We get great results; it’s the perfect self-targeting medium,” Mr. Schmidt said. “And they’re available 24/7.”

Also, “digital coupons attract younger consumers,” he said, “who aren’t buying the Sunday newspapers” that carry free-standing inserts.

In the digital coupon realm, Catalina executives “are playing come from behind, which they’re probably not used to,” Mr. Schmidt said. “But they have strong content and a strong sales force.”

Another point in Catalina’s favor is that Couponnetwork.com includes a type of Catalina in-store offer, called YourBucks, that are prized by couponers like Ms. Cataldo because they offer discounts off whatever they buy the next time they shop rather than savings on a single specified item the way regular coupons do.

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The retailers whose checkouts have been home to Catalina’s printers are unlikely to bemoan the company’s expansion online because they, too, have been going digital.

“More and more of our offerings are moving online as well, replacing circular coupons,” said Karen Meleta, a vice president at ShopRite, part of the Wakefern Food Corporation in Keasbey, N.J.

There is a section of Shoprite.com devoted to YourBucks along with other coupons.

Ms. Gear said Catalina has also been considering initiatives in areas like daily deals and group buying, adding, “We’re working with our clients to figure out how to market in this new world.”

“There’s a fun, engaging, gaming element to couponing,” Ms. Gear said. “We are exploring how you take the concept of social networks and add that to it.”

Among the attractive aspects of how social coupons work are the “element of urgency to the daily-deal buying,” she added, and their interruptive nature as companies “send out texts or e-mails.”

Because Catalina is privately held, she added, the company would not disclose how much it has spent on developing Coupon Network. Catalina is owned by the investment firm Hellman & Friedman.

 

Advertising: A Line of Brews Draws a Star Endorser, and Critics

In a promotional video on YouTube, Snoop Dogg, a white fur coat over his shoulders and surrounded by models in skimpy dresses, poses for the photographer Estevan Oriol while holding cans of Blast and the original Colt 45. The photos will be used for promotional purposes, like making 7-foot cardboard cutouts featuring the rapper for in-store displays, and for delivery truck decals.

Blast initially is focusing on “viral campaigns with Twitter, Facebook and blogs,” said Evan Metropoulos, who with his brother, Daren, runs Colt 45 as an owner of the Pabst Brewing Company, the brand’s parent company. Pabst was bought in 2010 by Metropoulos & Company, an investment firm started by their father, Dean.

Snoop Dogg has mentioned Blast repeatedly on Facebook, where he has more than eight million followers, and on Twitter, where he has more than 3.1 million. In “Boom,” a single on his new album, “Doggumentary,” he mentions Colt 45 in the lyrics.

“That’s just him being a true partner and saying I’m not just an endorser,” said Daren Metropoulos. “Whether he’s putting it in his songs or having his posse drinking it, it’s part of his lifestyle.”

Available in four flavors — grape, raspberry watermelon, blueberry pomegranate and strawberry lemonade — Blast joins the rapidly growing category of sweetened alcoholic beverages that go by many names, including flavored malt beverages and progressive adult beverages.

But critics, who believe the soda-like flavors and colorful labels appeal to underage drinkers, have their own term: alcopops.

“We have always considered them cocktails on training wheels,” said Michael J. Scippa, public affairs director of the Marin Institute, an alcohol industry watchdog. “It’s a way to bridge young consumers’ fondness for juices and sodas to alcohol.”

The group, which had criticized caffeinated alcoholic brands including Four Loko before they were required by the Food and Drug Administration to remove caffeine from their formulas recently, started an online petition opposing Blast, which in two weeks has been signed by about 1,000 people.

Like Four Loko, Blast is 12 percent alcohol by volume, more than twice most major beer brands, and is sold in 23.5-ounce cans, meaning drinking one (suggested retail price: $2.49) is the equivalent alcohol intake of more than four 12-ounce bottles of beer.

While most alcohol brands follow industry guidelines to advertise only in media outlets where no more than 30 percent of their audience is under 21, Mr. Scippa said that social networks like Facebook and Twitter “are for the most part unrestricted.” As for Snoop Dogg promoting Blast through those networks, and on YouTube, Mr. Scippa said that a “huge segment” of his fans were underage.

Tom Burrell, a former advertising executive and author of “Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority,” faulted the company for introducing Blast under the umbrella of Colt 45 and hiring the rapper.

“What is happening here is an obvious attempt to foist this stuff on young African-American men,” Mr. Burrell said. “Colt 45 has invested in the black consumer market for years, and if they weren’t looking for an African-American audience they wouldn’t be using Snoop Dogg.”

In a survey of malt liquor drinkers by Mintel, the market research firm, Colt 45 was the most popular over all, with 25 percent of whites and 34 percent of blacks drinking it. The second and third most popular brands found more favor among whites, with 25 percent drinking Mickey’s compared with 16 percent of blacks, and 22 percent drinking Olde English 800 compared with 17 percent of blacks.

Robert Jackson, a member of the New York City Council, wrote a letter in March to the state liquor board requesting that restrictions be imposed on Blast.

“Blast comes in very colorful cans and bottles and clearly is marketed to kids, just like Four Loko,” said Martin Collins, an aide to Mr. Jackson.

The flavored malt beverage category totaled $967.7 million for the 52 weeks that ended March 20, an increase of nearly 20 percent over the prior year, according to the SymphonyIRI Group, the market data firm whose totals do not include Wal-Mart or liquor stores. (Like beer, the beverages are sold largely in supermarkets and convenience stores.)

The Mike’s Hard Lemonade Company, with other flavors including limeade, leads the category with a 37.1 percent share, followed by Smirnoff Ice varieties, with a 22.7 percent share.

Fruit-flavored alcohol finds more favor with female drinkers, with 62 percent liking it compared with 48 percent of men, according to Mintel. As for age preferences, Mintel polled only legal imbibers, finding the drinks to be most popular among those 21 to 24, with 73 percent approving, and popularity waning steadily with age: 39 percent of those 55 to 64 liked the beverages, and 26 percent of those over 65.

According to American Medical Association findings, 82 percent of teenage girls who have tried the beverages prefer them to beer or other alcoholic drinks, while one-third incorrectly believe they contain less alcohol than beer.

Evan Metropoulos said Blast was formulated partly to appeal to the palates of women, who “wanted an alternative to lager and beer flavors,” and that seven-ounce bottles, sold in six-packs for about $7, will appeal to women more than 23.5-ounce cans, and reflects a commitment to provide smaller sizes to encourage moderation.

The company expects Blast to appeal primarily to consumers in their late 20s or early 30s, he said.

“All we were doing was putting together flavors that were appealing to people that definitely are over the legal age,” said Evan Metropoulos, responding to criticism of Blast. “We’re going to do our very best to hammer home the message of responsible drinking.”

“It’s not like our distributors are putting it in the soda section, and these are clearly designated as an alcoholic product,” added Daren Metropoulos. “We’re not going to be showing up and selling this at schools or anything like that.”

 

Advertising: A Younger Group for Feminine Products

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The site, Kotex.com/tween, urges mothers to pick a date soon to explain menstruation, and clicking on “get the right products” takes mothers to a page promoting the brand’s newest offering: U by Kotex Tween.

In what the brand says is an industry first, the pads are designed specifically for 8- to 12-year-olds and are 18 percent shorter and narrower than other Kotex pads. Sold in glittery boxes decorated with hearts, stars and swirls (which are also printed on the pads themselves), the products would look at home on the set of “Hannah Montana,” the Disney Channel show that starred the actress Miley Cyrus.

“These pads are designed to fit smaller girls’ body size, with bold and glittery packages” that also appeal to them, said Melissa Sexton, a marketing director in the adult feminine care division at Kimberly-Clark, which owns the brand.

On the site, Dr. Lissa Rankin, a gynecologist and author of “What’s Up Down There?: Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist if She Was Your Best Friend,” is featured in a video encouraging mothers.

“A lot of moms have a hard time even talking to their own peers about this issue and have to get over their own embarrassment so they can have a candid, fun and supportive conversation with their daughters,” Dr. Rankin said in a phone interview.

On another area of the site, intended for prospective users, UbyKotex.com/HelloPeriod, visitors share videos and written accounts of their first periods. One out of three females has no idea what is happening when her first period arrives, while four out of five mothers feel ill-prepared to educate their daughters about menstruation, according to surveys commissioned by Kotex.

The sites for both mothers and their daughters are by Organic, part of the Omnicom Group.

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Susan Kim, co-author of “Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation,” was initially startled by the introduction of U by Kotex Tween.

“What punched me in the gut is that the age of menarche had dropped so precipitously,” said Ms. Kim, using the term for first menstruation. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, a period kit for an 8-year-old — eek!’?”

But she does not dispute the need for products that cater to girls that young, and lauded the brand’s approach.

“It was not that long ago that girls used to pass around the Judy Blume book, ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,’?” because it addressed stigmatized topics including menstruation, Ms. Kim said. “It was such contraband material, so I liked that on the preteen site that it very much was a place for girls to share, with firsthand testimony.”

From 1920 to 1984, the average age of menarche dropped from 13.3 to 12.4, according to a 2007 article in the Journal of Adolescent Health. A study published in Pediatrics last year found that in the United States, 15 percent of American girls begin puberty by age 7.

The U by Kotex line was introduced in 2010 with a marketing campaign aimed at women 14 to 22 that skewers feminine care companies, including Kotex itself, for the typically euphemistic tone and dainty tropes of their ads.

“The ads on TV are really helpful because they use that blue liquid,” says a woman in her early 20s in the first U by Kotex commercial, as blue liquid is poured on a pad. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s what’s supposed to happen.’?”

The commercial, by JWT, which is a part of WPP, has been viewed more than 1.2 million times on YouTube.

With the motto “Break the Cycle,” the brand uses humor to challenge the stigma around menstrual products in Web-only videos, also by Organic, including one in which a woman standing with her bike outside a drugstore asks men to go in and buy her tampons because she forgot her bike lock. While some offer to watch her bike, none will make the purchase.

Over the 52 weeks that ended March 20, the share of all Kotex products in the $634 million tampon category increased 4.1 points, for a 15.9 percent share, while in the $893 million sanitary napkins and liners segment, the brand increased 1.7 points, for a 19.4 percent share, according to Symphony/IRI Group, a market data firm whose totals do not include Wal-Mart.

U by Kotex spent $23.2 million on advertising in 2010, eclipsing the $4.1 million Kimberly-Clark spent on the older Kotex brand, according to the Kantar Media Unit of WPP. Tampax, by Procter & Gamble, which dominates the tampon segment with a 47.2 percent share, spent $49.9 million.

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U by Kotex recently began addressing the look of feminine care products, which have traditionally been plain white, by printing various designs on pads. With what the brand calls a “limited-edition designer series,” prints like “poptimistic” and “punk glam,” will be introduced for U by Kotex products in July.

Meanwhile, an online pad design contest, Ban the Bland, began April 4 and has drawn more than 1,600 submissions. Three contestants with the most online votes will be flown in September to New York, where they will collaborate with Patricia Field, the costume designer for “Sex and the City.”

“Why should we settle for feminine care being dull and white and boring?” said Ms. Sexton about the designs on both the U by Kotex and U by Kotex Tween pads. “Every day when we get dressed, we have a choice of what we wear, and when we have our periods we should still have that choice.”