The campaign is for the MegaRed brand of krill oil supplement sold by Schiff Nutrition International in Salt Lake City. The campaign, which is being created by the New York office of MC Saatchi, carries the theme “Whose heart do you love?”
The centerpiece of the campaign is the MegaRed fan page on Facebook, where visitors will find a custom application through which they can request free product samples for “the heart of someone you love.”
In an altruistic touch, those brand fans who request the MegaRed samples for friends, family and other loved ones will receive free samples as well. And in another such aspect of the campaign, Schiff says it will donate $100,000 to the National Coalition for Women With Heart Disease if the company gives away 100,000 samples.
The campaign also includes other social media platforms like Twitter, where celebrities who include Joy Bauer, Toni Braxton and Jennie Garth are posting comments about it on their Twitter feeds, and YouTube, where a fast-paced, lighthearted video clip about the campaign can be watched.
The 60-second video — created by MC Saatchi New York with the help of Stardust, an animation company in Los Angeles — can also be watched on the Facebook fan page.
The budget for the campaign is estimated at $250,000, which includes the cost of the samples; each sample is a single MegaRed pill in a packet.
The timing of the campaign, which began last week, is prompted by Valentine’s Day, arriving on Thursday. The link is underlined in the video clip, which suggests giving whatever heart you love a free sample of MegaRed omega-3 krill oil.
The video offers up a panoply of potential hearts, paired in serious and fanciful fashion. Among them are “a straight heart or a gay heart,” “a gentle heart or a passionate heart,” “a simple heart or a complicated heart,” “a happy heart or a grumpy heart” and “a sweet heart or a tough heart.”
The campaign is among a skein of campaigns with themes related to Valentine’s Day, one of the most popular dates on the marketing calendar each year. Among others with heart holiday campaigns are Banana Republic, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, Hershey, Kay Jewelers, Jared, Macy’s, Mars, Pizza Hut and the San Antonio Convention and Visitors Bureau. When the word “red” is in the name of a product, the marketers of said product might find it hard to resist running a campaign tied to Valentine’s Day. And when the product is billed as helping promote heart health, such a campaign may seem a slam-dunk.
“The nugget of the idea is relevance,” says Jennifer Steeves-Kiss, chief marketing officer at Schiff Nutrition International, what with February being “heart health month” because of Valentine’s Day.
(Yes, “Kiss” is indeed part of the surname of Ms. Steeves-Kiss, who is based in the Schiff office in Emeryville, Calif. Asked if “Kiss” was spelled as in “hug and kiss,” she replies, laughing, “Or as my husband would say, ‘Like the rock band.’ ”)
Ms. Steeves-Kiss describes herself as always looking “for relevant consumer hooks” for ads, to “make it motivational for the consumer to engage with you” and “accelerate the consumer’s willingness to participate.”
With MegaRed being a relatively new product, only six years old, a primary goal of campaigns for the brand is to raise awareness and “increase trial,” Ms. Steeves-Kiss says.
“We’ve been looking to do that both through traditional media” like print and radio, she adds, “and digital and social channels.”
“We want to start making digital and social a significantly greater priority for us,” Ms. Steeves-Kiss says, for a couple of reasons.
One reason is that when it comes to the MegaRed product category, “people are spending four to five hours a month online researching supplements if they’re supplement enthusiasts,” Ms. Steeves-Kiss says.
The other reason is that “we are in the middle of being acquired by Reckitt Benckiser,” she adds, and executives there “are great proponents” of digital and social marketing.
For ads in traditional media, Schiff works with Karlen Williams Graybill Advertising, based in New York, Ms. Steeves-Kiss says, and for ads in digital and social platforms, “we’ve worked with a variety of partners.”
Schiff had no relationship with MC Saatchi New York before the MegaRed campaign. Executives of the agency approached Ms. Steeves-Kiss on a speculative basis, proposing the social sampling idea for MegaRed, and, she says, she liked it enough to start working with them.
“MC Saatchi has some great skills in this space,” she adds, and “we have a digital effort that’s going to go forward with them” as a result of how the MegaRed campaign has turned out.
MC Saatchi, based in London, had a New York office for several years before closing it in 2007. This Version 2.0 of the office was opened last spring with Jeff Brooks as chief executive; he joined from Euro RSCG New York, now Havas Worldwide New York, where he had been chief executive and chief digital officer.
The outreach to Schiff on MegaRed was done as “part of an exercise where we were looking at various brands that had high growth potential,” Mr. Brooks says, and were in categories like consumer packaged goods and wellness products with which the principals of MC Saatchi New York have experience.
Those principals, in addition to Mr. Brooks, are Pierre Lipton, chief creative officer, and Sveta Doucet, chief strategy officer.
The concept of “framing a health and wellness product around the romance of Valentine’s Day” was unusual, Mr. Lipton says, as was the social sampling aspects of the campaign.
“The creative idea speaks to the higher-level benefit” of MegaRed, he adds. “And we found ‘if you give it to the heart you love’ to be motivating.”
According to the Kantar Media division of WPP, Schiff spent $13.6 million to advertise MegaRed in major media in the first nine months of last year, compared with $5.9 million in the same period of 2011.
The full-year total for 2011 was $10.6 million, Kantar Media reported, compared with $7 million in 2010 and $6.7 million in 2009.
Ms. Steeves-Kiss says she is optimistic that the goal of 100,000 samples will be reached to get the $100,000 donation to the women’s heart health organization.
“Of course we’re going to get 100,000,” she says. “I’m very confident the team is going to work hard to make this a success.”
Ms. Steeves-Kiss calls the campaign “a first effort in what I hope will be an ongoing program” for MegaRed.
“We expect to be engaging with people on a regular basis,” she adds.
Hmmm. Perhaps for St. Patrick’s Day, the next seasonal holiday on the marketing calendar, the brand could be renamed MegaGreen.
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Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/business/media/megared-promotes-my-healthy-valentine.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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