Quick Thoughts: Pilot Version
As I was getting ready for work this morning, I thought about what to blog about today. I have been in a bit of a funk lately. I have started several blog posts, but about half way through them, I stop. In fact, I have two posts that are about finished, I just can’t figure out how to end them. They are good posts, they just seem to short for me to justify posting them…until now. I introduce the pilot version of Nick’s “Quick Thoughts”:
Anyway, I was trying to think of a brand or ad campaign that caught my eye lately. I am really impressed with the new Mountain Dew/Halo 3 campaign. If you aren’t familiar with Halo, it is one of the most popular video games of all time. Hundreds of thousands of people log online and play each other in Halo every day. It has recently released its third edition and is more popular [worldwide] than ever before.
Mountain Dew got together with Halo 3 and developed a new flavor, just for this game. Having worked on a Coca-Cola project for a year during my last two semesters in college, I did a lot of research on the target demo and its media consumption habits. Video games are a growing media that many advertisers are trying to crack into. Mountain Dew took a great approach by promoting this new drink as ‘gamer fuel’. I guarantee there are kids around the country at this very moment shooting aliens and drinking this new drink in between kills.
The Mountain Dew brand has always appealed to extreme, youthful individuals. The X-games were a great fit for the extreme sports drink. I believe they found a very effective way to appeal to this demo without intruding. A very simple strategy has been aligned to sell the product and promote the video game at the same time. Product placement in retail stores brought shelf space for the new Halo 3 Mountain Dew to the video game aisle (I actually witnessed this first-hand in a Target yesterday). Also, I have seen one simple, :30 spot run on TV. It shows people from different past of the world yelling at their television sets (some while laying on/falling to the floor) and dropping their Xbox controllers. At first, I thought the spot was for the newly released FIFA Soccer ‘08 game since the gamers were multicultural and didn’t all speak [scream] in English. At the end of the spot, the player who is killing all of the other people is sitting back and drinking the new Halo 3 Mountain Dew. Simple. Direct. Memorable.
While working on our Coke campaign last year, we would have killed for a major release like Halo 3 during our campaign. Unfortunately for Coke, this launch fits Mountain Dew perfectly. I could have seen energy drinks such as Rockstar or Monster try to take advantage of such a campaign - but Mountain Dew beat them to the punch.
Also, while I’m praising Mountain Dew for its timeliness and strategy, allow me to further commend the brand for picking up one of the most popular sports figures in the country: Dale Earnhardt Jr. The energy drink version of Mountain Dew will be a primary sponsor for the face of NASCAR, recently acquired after Budweiser was forced out of Dale’s contract. This is a major win for Mountain Dew. We NASCAR fans seem to develop a strange affinity for our drivers’ primary sponsors. Considering the most popular driver in one of America’s most popular sports is now representing Mountain Dew, I can definitely see a lot of people backing the brand, simply because Dale Jr. drinks it.
I guess this pilot version of ‘Quick Thoughts’ wasn’t so short after all. I decided to start this chain of Quick Thoughts for those posts that only need a paragraph or two to contribute to the blog. That put aside, I am still very impressed with some of the moves Mountain Dew has made over the last few months. Now if only they could convince me that Diet Mountain Dew was just as “extreme” as regular Mountain Dew, then maybe I could help them out and buy more cases.
