Spreading the Doritos Lovers story....

We can't get over the amazing buzz being generated by our new Doritos Sweet Chili launch and the use of augmented reality on pack (which we covered in a previous post). We're still filling the distribution pipeline and it has been great to see the amount of traffic to the website with people uploading pictures of them in a front of their webcams 'unleashing' the Doritos Lover.

To explain the concept and help spread the Doritos Lovers story, this film was produced....

World's Largest Doritos making more headlines

Our World's Largest Doritos bag is making headlines around the globe. We tracked online buzz from Spain, France, Argentina, Venezuela and today I was happy to see the story make it to Advertising Age. 

Big bag... big news.

The World's Largest Doritos

Weeks ago our Doritos Brand Team, Alexandre Chiavegatti and Carol Gormezano, told me about a social network community of Doritos-lovers who were asking for a 5kg bag. So, we decided to make it happen.
















This past week dozens of giant bags were sent to members of the community as you can see in this first video.



The growth of social networks is fascinating and the challenge for marketers is how to leverage this universe in a non-intrusive way.

The team decided to have a little more fun and ended up producing a 3m bag with over 132kg of Doritos - obviously the largest in the world. The massive bag was presented at one of the coolest teen events, it went for a ride all over town in the back of pick-up truck and it was hauled up a five-story building. The buzz from both initiatives has been amazing.

In just a few days, over 11,000 mentions in blogs/twitters/sites and over 44,000 people saw the giant Doritos video we posted on YouTube.

This is the video of the giant Doritos...

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A brand all about guy gets girl

The new site for Axe® body deodorant in Brazil is graphically awesome, perfectly on target and is generating a lot of buzz within the local blogsphere.  For those who manage teen brands, this is definitely work worth learning from.  As you know, the brand is all about boy gets girl and the site embodies that from every angle possible.  There's even a very cool online game called 'Billions' that tests a guy's ability to get girls (I'm happy that our Doritos® brand is featured as a billboard within the game).  

Axe is a great example of a brand laser-focused on a very defined demographic with a perfectly crafted positioning. Well done. 

A Cultural Movement Celebrating Brazilian Bar Food

Saturday night I had dinner with Eduardo Maya and Eulália Araujo, the visionary founders of an annual culinary contest to find the very best Brazilian bar food, called Comida di Buteco.  What started off as a culinary contest 9 years ago is now an amazing cultural movement celebrating Brazil's botequims - the popular name for the authentic Brazilian pub - and the colorful food served with beer or cachaça. If Spain has the tapas, Brazil has the petiscos or tira-gostos as they are called.  It all started in Belo Horizonte, a city known as the bar capital of the country and is now spreading to other cities.

Eduardo Maya is a charismatic guy and an enthusiastic advocate for elevating Brazilian bar gastronomy - often considered low cuisine - to the respectful place it deserves in the country's food culture.  He also talks passionately about how this movement has exponentially improved the lives of dozens of families who own these bars and given them a sense of affiliation beyond what he had initially envisioned.

To give of an idea of how popular this movement is becoming, in the 2007 edition, 130,000 people voted for their favorite petiscos in 40 selected bars and the final event, which closes off the month-long Comida di Buteco, gathered over 500,000 people in a week-end of music and the best Brazilian bar food.  It ends with an awards ceremony.

Click here to read an article that ran on The New York Times on the Comida di Buteco movement.

Another great example of how certain cultural movements have the powerful force of mobilizing people behind a cause. 

Cultural Movement vs. Advertising Campaign

I have to confess that a few months back when I saw Argentina's Doritos TV Campaign 'Que Vuelvan Los Lentos' (Bring back slow dancing) I didn't quite get it.  In a terrible brand manager attitude I kept asking myself what was the product link between slow dancing and our famous tortilla chip brand.  

This week in London, I had the opportunity to watch Carlos Menendez, PepsiCo Snacks' Marketing Director for Argentina/Chile, present the strategy and I realized how wrong I was and how powerful the campaign really is.  Well, let me step back.  It's not really a campaign.  The Doritos Team in Argentina launched a cultural movement.  In his own words a 'crusade'.  A crusade to bring back slow dancing to a generation that is all about electronic music.

The new agency we are working with in Brazil, Strawberry Frog, talks a lot about the need to evolve the traditional advertising campaign and create cultural movements where brands embrace a cause... and hopefully inspire others to follow, interact, express themselves, take part in.  A powerful concept.

And that's exactly what happened in Argentina, Doritos did launch a TV movement to bring back slow dancing but the movement created a life of its own.  Thousands of communities were formed in social networks, dozens of radio stations and clubs altered their music programming and a slow-dancing flash mob (probably the world's first) took place at the Buenos Aires planetarium, bringing thousands of teens together.

Thanks Carlos Menendez in showing me the power of a true cultural movement, where the brand plays a strategically important role as an enabaler in bringing a memorable experience to consumers.  And how the message is just a spark that can transform in something very big. Great story.

A Seagull in Scotland Helps Prove the Power of Viral

For those who haven't seen it on YouTube or received it virally... a seagull in Scotland has developed the habit of stealing a bag a chips from a neighborhood convenience store. The seagull waits until the shopkeeper isn't looking, and then walks into the store and grabs a bag of Doritos® - Nacho Cheese. Once outside, the bag gets ripped open and shared by other birds. My team at PepsiCo Brazil immediately saw an opportunity to use this fun incident for a viral campaign and commissioned Edelman to spread the word. I was thrilled to see how much buzz it generated on blogs and websites throughout the country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLeHgabGqHY&eurl=http://vickiporter.wordpress.com/