Frito Lay’s Cheetos have launched an ambitious new online campaign that is surprisingly very effective. It is entertaining, engaging, and very impressive considering it is a viral game centered around cheese flavored snack products.
In their campaign titled “Battle of the Cheetos” users pick a side; crunchy or puffy and do battle with other users online. It is a strategy war game where animated Cheetos fight with cheese-powered weapons to determine the superior type of Cheeto. As players win more battles they are rewarded with upgrades and more Cheeto warriors for your regiment.
The animated battlefields spring from partnered websites from which the viral game is accessed, including Mashable, Gawker, BoingBoing.net, Gizmodo, and many others. Statistics can be tracked via Facebook to determine which users are the most skilled generals for both the puffy and crunchy armies. The gameplay is simple yet engaging and like all great online multiplayer games, it allows users to taunt their opponents and trash talk via their computer’s microphone. This imaginative campaign may seem like a very strange way to promote and sell Cheetos but it is already doing an excellent job if you consider the content and depth of the game. Consumers spend an average of 12 minutes playing branded games, much longer than they would with any traditional form of advertising, also consider the Facebook connectivity and the fact that this branded game is actually quite fun to play; the Battle of the Cheetos is an impressive campaign that manages to entertain players centered entirely around the Cheetos brand. It is easily the best branded online game I have experienced and will hopefully set the tone for all branded game content that will follow.
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Chado is a full service advertising and design firm, meaning we have the capabilities to develop all types of communication including print, broadcast, and digital media. We have developed successful visual communication pieces from engaging corporate videos to extensive, full-color, catalogs and everything in between. No matter what direction you want to take your brand, Chado can devise an effective solution to meet your goals and take your brand to the next level. Our current clients range from small local businesses to large multinational corporations and we are very good at working within your budget. If you want to introduce your brand to an international audience, increase your presence online, or simply grow your customer base within your local community, Chado has the skills, talents, and abilities to help your brand breathe with gripping visual communications and solid brand strategies. Feel free to contact us at anytime and we can sit down with you to show you previous work examples, discuss your goals, and aspirations and come up with an effective marketing strategy.
Earlier this year Dominoes pizza launched a new campaign in an attempt to re-brand their pizza. With consumer behavior shifting towards natural foods and gourmet offerings Dominoes adapted by changing their recipe and using better quality ingredients to improve the taste. To announce this they chose a risky campaign where they would admit that their then-current recipe tasted bad and quoted customers saying the crust is like cardboard and the sauce tastes like ketchup. It seemed like a huge risk openly admitting to your customers that you have knowingly been selling them a bad product for over fifty years. Also, the existing Dominoes customers are not buying their pizza for its superior taste, they are buying it for convenience. I personally thought this ad would backfire and burn bridges causing Dominoes to lose their loyal customers that still continue to eat their pizza in spite of all the better alternatives available.
Although it was extremely risky for the brand to devalue all their past brand messages and product lines, this campaign accomplished exactly what it set out to do; it got people talking about the brand again. “New and Improved” is one of the most overused phrases in marketing and simply communicating that they have a new recipe wouldn’t have been as effective without publicly bashing their product beforehand. In early January when the campaign launched, people were actually talking, tweeting, and blogging about Dominoes and the brand received more attention than it has in the past decade.
Yesterday it was reported that their new recipe and brutally honest campaign has been a success, at least in the short term, as Dominoes has more than doubled its fourth-quarter profit with curious customers trying their new recipe. Time will tell if this success will last but this early victory has been very interesting. As long as they can keep the momentum going and the novelty does not wear off, Dominoes big gamble with their brand will be well worth the risk.
