Momentum Creative Review: Little Debbie Hits The Road, Giving Away Cars and Cupcakes
We love Little Debbies - who can't love those creamy filled chocolate treats. And now, thanks to a massive experiential/sampling/digital campaign launching in the US, more and more people will come to know and love them too (if only they were coming down under). But, on our mission to find brands doing great work that entertains and engages people in fun ways, we couldn't help pass this one up (and thanks to Morgan at Momo St. Louis for telling us about this effort in his neck of the woods).Back to Little Debbie. The company just announced a huge effort - giving away 1,000,000 free cupcakes, visiting 21 US cities over an 8 week period, creating Little Debbie-themed SMART cars and more, all connected with the expected social media channels (i.e., Twitter and YouTube). It's a great example of what at first glance looks like a big sampling effort (get some free stuff here) and fortunately adds in some more twists and turns to make it a very solid campaign. Lets break it down a bit:
- Little Debbie's Facebook page. The brand does an amazing job of providing a combination of fun, entertaining content (like sharing old Little Debbie commercials, showing some celebs/sponsored people doing some fun things) along with some useful content (like coupons for Little Debbie cupcakes). And they recently added a way people can enter the overarching competition directly from the page - versus directing them back to the website.
- @LittleDebbie. We're always a bit leery of some brands on Twitter, but Little Debbie is simply having fun with fans via Twitter, adding some updates on the tour, along with just a good overall effort of increasing the positive personality of the brand via this channel. The brand thanks some mom bloggers (who we are guessing have received some samples) and simply uses the channel for good - no sales or buy our stuff messaging here.
- Timing. Not sure when it was created, or if it is its first year, but we don't celebrate and haven't heard of National Cupcake Day (18 October in the US), but we'd obviously love to participate. This provides a bit of a "why now" to the campaign, even if it is a little bit gimmicky (do we really need one day to celebrate cupcakes!). We're not really sure how people win cupcakes on the 18th of October (not really clear from the website), but again, happy to win down under if you want to send any our way.
- Value vs Time. We're big believers in ensuring that whatever we are offering people to win should easily outweigh the amount of time they need to put in. So, the fact that we could win a Little Debbie-themed Smart Car (valued at $17,000) to just enter in some contact details seems good to us. We probably would have uploaded a photo eating a Little Debbie to enter as well as the reward is a good one. So we're guessing Little Debbie is hoping the car incentive drives up the brands Facebook fans and overall database to directly reach consumers in the future - so a good investment. And the fact that we can win MP3 players, and GPS devices, and of course cupcakes, are solid secondary prizes too.
