The North American Effie Awards and ATOMCK have teamed up to present a special interview series featuring winners from the 2017 competition. Alan Hart, Managing Partner at ATOMCK and host of “Marketing Today,” sat down with these marketers to discuss insights from their Effie-winning work.
In this week’s 2017 Winner Spotlight, Hart spoke with Angela Gusse, Marketing Director for Pop-Tarts at The Kellogg Company, to discuss the “Pop-Tarts Soda-Mazing” campaign, created in partnership with VML.
Gusse notes that Pop-Tarts’ target consumers are teenagers, who, in today’s world, often find themselves bored and constantly using technology to find entertainment. Gusse and her team like to keep their advertising interesting and disruptive, and she knew she needed a campaign that would stand out from the virtual clutter teens navigate every day on their phones. Her team researched the trends and interests of teens and developed an eye-catching and viral campaign. A combination of popular musicians, crazy flavors and the latest app combined to create the “Pop-Tarts Soda-Mazing” campaign.
The campaign was a perfect example of multiple partnerships working together seamlessly to create never-before-seen content. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group joined with The Kellogg Company to cook up creative Pop-Tarts flavors like A&W Root Beer and Crush Orange. The crazy combinations began with the food and extended to commercials featuring mashups of teens’ favorite artists. The Kellogg Company partnered with Universal Music Group to find artists to mash-up each other’s songs using the popular Smule karaoke app. This idea culminated in DNCE and Ne-Yo teaming up, as well as Keke Palmer and Easton Corbin joining forces, to record and sing each other’s songs, which teens could then play in the Smule app, with the option to join in and see themselves singing beside the musicians. It was untraditional, like the flavors, and a big hit, trending on Facebook in its opening week.
