Doritos: With 15,819 Super Bowl ‘Friends,’ Who Needs Sales?
How much is a brand ‘friend’ worth online? Priceless, really, in the digital eyes of OMD Digital US Director, Scott Hagedorn. In his opening keynote at the Digital Media & Measurement conference in New York City, Hagedorn briefed an audience of about 200 ad agency execs, brand marketers, consumer researchers…on how Doritos aims to ‘crash the Superbowl,’ again, thanks to YOU!
The 2007 Doritos Super Bowl UGC campaign generated $36 million in ’ad equivalency’ and helped drive a double digit year over year increase in sales, according to Hagedorn. Despite such hard performance metrics, however, Doritos is paying more attention to making Superbowl friends, rather than money, this super go around. What a difference 15 months makes? Isobar has struggled in the past to convince client Adidas of the value of 60,000 MySpace “friends.“Hagedorn underscored that online friends rule and he proudly beamed that Doritos is winning the friending race, with Doritos’ 15, 819 Super Bowl 2008 friends dwarfing even Burger King’s 3000 friends!
Hagedorn made a case for influencing the influencers, hailing “swarm theory” and likening social media fueled brand momentum to a “swarm of insects” buzzing around stimuli.
How do brand marketers assure that the “insects swarm” in the desired manner though? Monitoring the infamous “digital conversations” that are generated is essential, Margie Chiu, Avenue A/Razorfish, indicated.
Developing and affecting “the conversation” happens along a brand continuum where need for control is leveraged against desire for high reach. Marketer-fueled conversation generating tools provide the most control, while consumer driven interactions offer the greatest reach.
Doritos believes it has figured out the optimal, Super Bowl 2008 mix.
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