The Call That Launched a popsicle to Stardom
Issue 19 | June 2011
Agency
Proximity Colombia
Creative Team
Chief Executive Officer: Mario Bertieri; Chief Creative Officer: Sandra Piedrahita; Creative Director: Alejandro Mesa; VP Account: DJuan Fernando Nino; Account Director: Carolina de la Torre; Executive Account: Acrolyn Forero; Copywriter: Maria Jimena Mesa; Art Director: Angela Obando; Web Designer: Daniel Ramirez
Date
January 2011
Background
Aloha is an ice-cream in Colombia that claims to cool down teens when they do something embarrassing. The task was to launch a new orange flavour but using an old TV commercial, which had not been at all successful first time around.
Idea
The TV spot had shown Pablo, a teenager, calling his girlfriend and declaring his love by singing a rather cheesy love song to her. Only, it wasn’t her he had got through to but her older sister.
The insight was that kids like to laugh at anything that embarrasses their friends. Working from this, the idea was to take Pablo’s embarrassment and bring it to life in a series of wrong phonecalls.
Teens were steered to a website where they could enter the names and phone numbers of their friends so that Pablo could ring them and embarrass them, thus creating much amusement for everyone else.
More than 170,000 teens were called by Pablo, singing his heart out.
Results
More than 90,000 teens had answered the call from Pablo in the first week of the campaogn alone and so Aloha had to buy another 80,000 more. In the middle of a rainy season, when nobody buys popsicles and sales always fall, they managed to achieve an uplift of 115%. All with just a simple phone call.
Our Thoughts
There are plenty of examples of marketing success when the mobile has been used as a computer but few when it’s been used as a phone. By and large, unwanted calls really annoy those who receive them, irrespective of their age-group, but this idea gets away with it because it is so understanding of kids. They are still young enough to like ice-cream and to be embarrassed easily but just old enough to be obsessed with love and sex.
The calls here are legitimised because, though it’s Aloha who put them through, it’s actually the recipient’s mates who are responsible.
It’s also a very knowing idea, recognizing that sometimes an ad canb be so bad as to be almost good. Perhaps Ferrero Rocher’s ambassador has a new lease of life waiting for him in a campaign like this?