Winner: General Mill & Padilla Speer Beardsley
Campaign: Big G Brands Turn PEZ Heads
Budget: $68,995, including $35,375 in fees and $33,620 in expenses. This budget is for PSB's communications efforts only. It does not include General Mills' marketing
investment in packaging, partnerships, etc.
The childhood thrill of digging your way to the prize in a cereal box is a fond memory for most of us. But some avid PEZ collectors got to relive the excitement last year when
General Mills introduced a unique prize.
Recognizing the trend in nostalgia items, the company's marketing department thought a PEZ premium could be a great success - not just with kids, but with moms and dads who
remembered PEZ from their own childhoods. The company partnered with PEZ to create four exclusive mini-dispensers: The Trix Rabbit, Lucky the Leprechaun, Sonny the Cuckoo Bird and
the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee.
After a heavy marketing investment in the promotion itself, General Mills turned to PR in April to develop a promotion with a goal of achieving 50 million consumer exposures
and selling 11.5 million packages of cereal.
"At face value, this was a cereal promotion," says Tom Jollie, SVP of consumer marketing for Padilla Speer Beardsley, which partnered with General Mills on the promotion. "PEZ
has been around for 50 years." PSB knew, however, that grown-up PEZ collectors would jump on the premium if they thought it was truly special.
Jollie and his team turned to the editor of PEZ Collector's News, the curator of the Museum of PEZ, and the Annual National PEZ Collector's Convention organizer to solicit
their input and support. Because the dispensers were mini-dispensers and did not have springs (small parts floating around in a kids cereal box were a no-no), some persnickety
collectors doubted their authenticity. But once the PEZ "authorities" had endorsed the dispensers, and they were unveiled at the Collector's Convention, PEZ addicts embraced them.
One called Jollie to rave that the Cheerios Bee dispenser had a rare two-color stem.
The PR team also partnered with eBay (originally begun as a PEZ collectors site) for a charity auction of a set of dispensers benefiting the Children's Miracle Network.
The whimsical story of the nostalgic dispensers caught the attention of media, garnering 69 million impressions and beating the campaign's goal of 50 million. The campaign
drove a 7.9 percent increase in sales across the four cereal brands during the promotional period. General Mills research shows about 11 percent of households that bought the
brands during the promotion had not purchased any Big G cereal in the prior six months. (Contact: Jollie: 612/455-1700)