FreshNetworks Blog

Earlier this week, whilst the Czech Republic were playing Turkey in Euro 2008, an advert aired in prime time on UK television that cost just £6.50 to make.

The ad was the winner of a competition that Doritos had been running, getting customers to create their own adverts: You make it, we play it. The winning ad, Tribe, was conceived, designed, filmed and edited by two Doritos fans. It cost less than £10 to make (although the slot in which is aired probably cost about £45,000 to buy) - just two packs of Doritos,  two pots of salsa and some blu-tack.

Watch the ad below; it’s really rather good.

What interests me about this ad is the way Doritos successfully combined a campaign to engage customers with a real reward for their loyalty. They experimented with online engagement - getting people to visit a site and upload their own videos, and with a new form of advertising - showing a completely amateur-made ad. I love it when people try new things, the press they create is often huge and the potential of finding a real innovation is palpable.

In advertising at the moment, as in customer engagement there is a lot of innovation going on. As we’ve seen with Honda in the UK (see post here) and eBay in France (see post here) there are some great things being experimented with. In all of these instances what brands are doing is trying to turn adverts into events. Build up to the event by created activity online, and then provide a way for people to continue to engage with the brand and the advert after it has aired.

In the Doritos case, there is something else at play. Everybody who has submitted, viewed or commented upon a video during the competition feels invovled in the final outcome. They have built mass engagement, rather than just a mass of viewers. The ad, being part of this ongoing engagement process, will have a greater, lasting effect than a traditional advert would. They started to move the advert from just a push marketing message to customer engagement.