Jack in the Box (which I'm told is best described as a perfect cross between White Castle on Crack mixed with Stephen King's IT Character) recently dipped its cone into the social media snark-infested (oh I am trademarking that - full attribution required from hereon end) waters with it's "conversation starter" Super Bowl commercial commercial.
Bringing back shades of Frontier Airline's Flip the Dolphin, JITB created a website - Hang in there Jack - which included 81,000 get well messages from "concerned" patrons, including videos and songs. There was also (of course) a blog, which included comments like these:
- You all are morons. I like checking out most dot com websites .but yours is the epitomy of the worst. Your humanity is absurd
- Makes no difference to me, because Jack never came up here to feed us New Yorkers. We should grill Jack like a Pig and eat him.
- Your food makes me poop
That's where it gets interesting and where JITB might (I stress might) have succeeded where Skittles failed. With the exception of vulgarity and profanity, of which poop is apparently neither, the company let the conversation extend and evolve (or devolve) as it might...
No question that irreverence is a major part of this brand's make-up and personality. Couple that with a more open-minded, pragmatic and honest approach to dealing with consumer generated content and the "conversation", and you have a pretty authentic mixture of good and bad...peacefully co-exiting side by side.
According to the LA Times, the six-week "Hang in There Jack" campaign (Secret Weapon Marketing, Santa Monica) was a remarkable document: a 360-degree social media event that mocked even as it exploited the power of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Along the way it leveraged irony to the breaking point with "viral" cellphone and faux-paparazzi videos, ring tones and texting. Among the crowd-sourced content were 27 get-well videos from fans, some quite brilliant. A man in Hawaii bought Jack's size-14 Bruno Magli shoe on EBay for $910. Now that's buy-in.
Clearly there was leadership, pre-sell and management of expectations by and from both client and agency in this case. JITB execs contended that the social media component of this program generated impressions (4.8 million video impressions for example) which would have cost "three times as much" using traditional media.
The other obvious ingredient in this taco was strategy (repositioning; relaunching) as hard as it may seem when you read a blog post written by a fictional demented clown titled "My post coma plans"
Jack's back, baby. Jack's back.
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