Campbell-Ewald Los Angeles came out on top of the heap in AdPack USA’s Inaugural Tissue Tactics Contest with a hankie designed for client Kaiser Permanente. Together, that agency and its client will receive the award in a New York ceremony on June 26.
AdPack, a direct mail packager, challenged the advertising industry to create a marketing campaign with individualized tissue packs as the medium. Although new to the U.S. market, tissue-packs are a major ad venue in Asia. Last year, Japanese advertisers alone spent $1 billion to produce some 4 billion tissue packs to promote their products.
The Campbell-Ewald entry played off Kaiser’s existing “Thrive” campaign. The project bore the name “You’re So Beastly” and listed facts about human tears, noting that “humans are the only animals who shed tears of emotion.” The tissue medium offered a personal and natural way to build the Kaiser brand without directly selling health insurance.
“We live in a very cluttered media environment and marketers are constantly looking for new ways to engage their audience,” said George Shababb, chief operating officer at TNS Media Research. “This is a great, cost-effective method of putting brands directly in touch with consumers.”
Campbell-Ewald Los Angeles will take home $5,000 plus a free 10,000-unit production run of the winning “Beastly” design. The entry came from the L.A.-based creative team of Mike Conboy and Neville Anderson. “Leveraging tissue packs as an advertising medium continues our successful strategy of communicating the Kaiser Permanente ‘Thrive’ message in unexpected places,” said Debbie Karnowsky, executive creative director at Campbell-Ewald Los Angeles.
Second place in the contest went to Connecticut-based Colangelo, the agency for Cookhouse BBQ restaurant. The tissue pack offered relief from the client’s spicy chicken wings. Cincinnati-based Barefoot took third place for its design on behalf of WonderBra. The campaign explained alternate uses for tissues since women no longer need to stuff their bras, thanks to the client’s product.
Mobile House Ads
In the sprawling L.A. market, truck-mounted billboards have become a favorite medium for real estate developers who need to reach a geographically specific audience.
New housing projects use the trucks to introduce themselves to potential buyers in distant cities or surrounding neighborhoods, according to Citi-Mobile, the nation’s largest truck advertising firm, headquartered in Glendale.
“Although we have always catered to the needs of development projects, this year there is a noticeable spike in this business category,” said Kevin Bartanian, senior account executive for Citi-Mobile. One client sold a personal record five homes in a month and reported a doubling of traffic to his Web site, Bartanian added.
Locally, Olson Homes ranks as the biggest truck-based advertiser, spreading the word about its 133 Promenade Walk project in Long Beach.
Citi-Mobile’s trucks typically operate eight to 10 hours per day. Specially trained professional drivers take the trucks on streets that, based on Census data and private demographic information, reach the client’s target audience. The trucks have an online tracking system so the client knows the precise campaign travel route at all times.
Because real estate advertising is such a low-probability game, it helps that the cost for mobile billboards is usually less than 5 cents per thousand impressions, according to Citi-Mobile. The trucks carry 10-foot by 22-foot ads, visible on both sides.
As for the ad’s design, “the less words, the better the ads,” said Bartanian. However, those words should include a call to action, such as a phone number or a sale date. “You only have limited time because you don’t know if the person will see the ad from a car driving by or standing with the truck driving by,” he said.
Pop Go the Trojans
A team of students from USC placed third among 255 entries in a competition to create an integrated marketing campaign for Coke Classic, the flagship brand of Coca-Cola Co.
The 50-person USC team was advised by Ken Wilbur, assistant professor at the Marshall School of Business. The project drew students from Marshall, the Annenberg School of Communications, the USC School of Cinematic Arts and other programs.
The USC approach differed from most other schools, Wilbur said. First, they conducted a focus group to find consumers’ latent associations with the Coke Classic brand. The resulting insight was that most consumers were not allowed to drink Coca-Cola as children and their earliest memory of the brand came when an adult bent the rules and gave them a Coke to drink.
The National Student Advertising Competition is organized by the American Advertising Federation, a national trade group. The USC entry won the Southern California district competition before taking third at the national finals.
Staff reporter Joel Russell can be reached at
[email protected]
, or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 237.
