Advertising: Companies Try a Personal Touch Seen by Thousands

The mushroom was, in fact, Mel, the mascot from the Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers chain, but Ms. Plyler, who was with her mother-in-law, did not recognize him as such. When she turned around to look at Mel, he stood motionless, and it unsettled her.

“I am deathly terrified of people in mascot-type uniforms, and he was really creepy because he has almost like this blank stare like he was staring right through you,” Ms. Plyler said in a telephone interview.

It turns out that Ms. Plyler, 25, a law student at the North Carolina Central University School of Law, had recently begun to follow Mellow Mushroom on Twitter. And Mellow Mushroom, which like many businesses reciprocally follows consumers on Twitter, had decided as a promotional stunt to follow some of those consumers in the literal sense — and to bring a film crew.

Six hidden cameras, in places like a portable toilet, a van and inside the mushroom costume, documented Ms. Plyler’s reaction as she was followed around the market.

On Oct. 22, Mellow Mushroom posted the video featuring Ms. Plyler on YouTube. The ominous score of a horror movie plays as Mel lurks behind her. When he gets to within arm’s reach, she turns around, and Mel slowly raises an arm and slowly extends and lowers each of his fingers in succession in an oddly menacing wave.

The video cuts to Ms. Plyler happily sharing a slice of pizza with Mel at a table set up in a parking lot. It closes with the text, “Follow us and we’ll follow you,” and directs viewers to FollowMellow.com, a tab on the company’s Facebook page that features several more videos of other Twitter users being stalked by Mel and a second mushroom mascot, Dude.

The videos are by Fitzgerald Company in Atlanta, part of McCann Worldgroup, which is owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies. Production is by Arts and Sciences and direction is by Adam Brodie and Dave Derewlany.

In early October, the crew secretly filmed about 20 Twitter users being followed by the mascots, and Mellow Mushroom continues to add new videos to YouTube from the outings. The agency used social networks, especially Facebook, to contact relatives and friends to act as confederates — in Ms. Plyler’s case, her mother-in-law — to help coordinate the stunt.

“We have such an irreverent brand that we thought it would be cool and interesting to really follow consumers not just on Twitter but in a real-world way,” said Annica Kreider, vice president of brand development at Mellow Mushroom, which was founded in 1974 in Atlanta and has about 130 restaurants across the country. “Part of why we do things like this is to say that we are a different brand and we aren’t going to give you the same old sales propaganda.”

Brands typically use social networks as extensions of their customer service departments, monitoring Twitter and Facebook for complaints, and mollifying consumers before they get so fed up that they do something like post negative online reviews or rant in a YouTube video.

But brands also increasingly are using social networks in more idiosyncratic ways to win over fans through acts of whimsy.

On Oct. 8, for example, Richard Neill, a Facebook user, jokingly posted on the wall for Bodyform, a feminine care brand sold by SCA Personal Care in Britain. Euphemistic Bodyform commercials Mr. Neill saw as a child, he wrote, gave him warped expectations.

“As a child I watched your advertisements with interest as to how at this wonderful time of the month that the female gets to enjoy so many things,” wrote Mr. Neill, saying that he had been jealous he could not also partake in a monthly flurry of activity that included bicycling, roller coaster riding, dancing and parachuting.

But Mr. Neill continued that, far from such activities and from innocuous product demos using blue fluid, when he finally had a girlfriend and that “time of the month” arrived, she changed from “loving” and “gentle” to “the little girl from the exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin.”

Bodyform has fewer than 7,500 followers on Facebook, and Mr. Neill has only about 415 friends on the social network, but the post was shared so often that more than 100,000 users have read it and clicked the “like” icon.

On Oct. 16, eight days after Mr. Neill’s post, Bodyform posted a video on YouTube and Facebook that responded to Mr. Neill directly.

In the video, an actress who identifies herself as the Bodyform chief executive sits at a desk and pours herself a glass of blue liquid from a pitcher.

“We lied to you Richard, and I want to say ‘Sorry,’ ” she says. “What you’ve seen in our advertising so far isn’t a factual representation of events.”

After admitting that during periods some women get cramps, mood swings and “blood coursing from our uteri,” she takes a sip of the blue fluid. A sound comes from her chair, and she adds, “Ooh, sorry Richard, you did know that we do that too, didn’t you?”

The video has garnered more than 3.2 million views on YouTube. It is by Carat, London, part of Aegis Group, with production by Rubber Republic, also in London.

“I don’t think we could have done that with above-the-line advertising,” said Anne McCreary, digital strategy director at Carat, referring to the provocative humor in the video. “But for brands to be relevant to consumers, they have to develop a new way of interacting with consumers that is much more about responding to them.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/business/media/companies-try-a-personal-touch-seen-by-thousands.html?partner=rss&emc=rss