I recently came across an advertising campaign in the subway in New-York for Tropicana’s iconic product: the famous orange juice that you would enjoy for breakfast.
What is it about?
It is a crowd-sourced advertising campaign what is made of tweets posted by commuters and New-Yorkers. The tweets featuring the hashtag “#WorstMorningEver” are then reviewed by the campaign team, and the more interesting ones – read the most funny ones – are featured and displayed in the subway, on busses, in stores, on billboards or on taxis.
Participants would write a tweet telling a short story of something that happened to them in the morning, understating that Tropicana Orange Juice was there to save their morning, and save their life. Of course, this is supposed to be humorous. Some of the tweets are probably made up, but who cares?
Here are some examples of the real tweets that are featured in this campaign, along with the username of their respective authors.
Beyond humor, the use of those bright acid colors – yellow, pink, green – and the large fonts has certainly caught my eyes. And it worked: I memorized the brand name easily.
What I like about it
A campaign using twitter, using the real people’s voice and word is something I generally like – though we can easily imagine that some tweets would have been filtered out.
Also I like that the campaign is running on multiple supports, in many different places. That’s also something advertising agency clients like: when they pay for a campaign, clients generally like to see their brands being advertised all over the place. So I suppose that the marketers from the PepsiCo owned brand might also be happy with it.
With this kind of advertising, even on a difficult morning you can’t probably miss the campaign :)
The offline part of the campaign is also described here on CBS Outdoor’s website.
It’s a “wait marketing” campaign that proposes to commuters to actually do something of the wasted time while you would normally wait for your train or your bus. It’s not trying to draw you and to steal of your time while you’re at work.
Oh, and beyond the campaign, there’s a contest and if you participate, you could win one year of orange juice from Tropicana. Did I mention that the campaign is still active? Feel free to play, and good luck!
Brighten up your #worstmorningever! Follow & RT us by EOD for a chance to win 1 @tropicanaoj/month for a year! Rules bit.ly/OFpkHc
— Tropicana (@TropicanaOJ) October 25, 2012
What I do less like in this campaign
Well. Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of this campaign. But the devil is in the details.
- Point #1
If you’re to tweet during your commute, you’ll need to actually have signal while on the subway platform to do so. And if you’ve ever used the subway in NYC, you should know that it’s very unlikely.
- Point #2
And since the hashtag is quite long, you may have a hard time to memorize it and tweet later. It actually happened to me on the first time I saw this campaign: I was unable to remember and to find the hashtag from a Google search when I got network access again.
- Point #3
As some other blogger have already said, the overall feeling that is perceived is negative. The hashtag starts with “worst” and you generally don’t want this word to be associated with your products and brands :)
Maybe there would have been a way to do the exact same thing but turned into positive. There must be a way.
Not everyone does agree on this aspect about negative versus positive. See below (**)
- Point #4
And now, let’s put ourselves in the client’s shoes for a moment.
I honestly do not know what was the question that they asked to their agency in the first place, and what was their main business concern. But if you have a look at the history of their twitter followers’ count, you can probably suppose that the campaign was not about twitter recruitment, or we could call it a FAIL.
The campaign started in September 18th, and on the twitter followers graph you can hardly detect an impact on their twitter followers’ growth.
Oh, I forgot to mention that given the rules of the contest, you have to “follow” the @TropicanaOJ twitter account in order to participate.
But we do not know about the goals. Maybe is was more about brand awareness, or may be it was to show some proximity with the hard core users of social networks, this same portion of their audience that got mad at the brand sometimes ago when they were going for a package redesign. Remember this episode of online drama?
What do you think?
So, what do you think? Have you seen the campaign in NYC? Would you participate to such a campaign during your commute – provided that you have signal and internet access? And what do you think about the outcome of the campaign? Do you think that it’s effective?
[Edit]
Not everyone does agree with me saying that the campaign is spreading negativity. This blog post tells us that it’s not negativity: it’s a truism. And according to it’s author, it’s OK in an ad, and it would work. But again, it doesn’t seem to work that well, according to the twitter followers number.
Let us know in the comments!
Further reading
Other blog posts also discussing this campaign:
http://danrichardsjr.com/post/34724800775/tropicana-worst-morning-ever-campaign
http://www.jeffgreenhouse.com/2011/08/04/tropicana-new-york-mornings-campaign/
https://consumerbehaviourmcgill.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/tropicanas-guerilla-marketing/
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