Hi and welcome to my blog! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting and do come back.

Doritos has been everywhere lately, all over the radio, a few other ads here and there. Basically they have been punting their Facebook page.

I eventually saw that one of my friends on FB had joined the group as well as ±1500 people.

My immediate reaction is that this is a flop of a campaign. Advertising on radio is no cheap affair but an affair it is. You face the risk of being caught out by your better half - the listeners or target market. And to me it seems as though this has happened to Doritos.

Why I think this is campaign was a flop?

Coming off the back of a great advertising campaign with their “Moment of boldness” A few years ago I can’t believe that Doritos could have done so badly with this one. That campaign was a viral campaign before there were viral campaigns. To this day I know many people who still joke about their moments of boldness.

At the time of writing this post there were 777 122 people from South Africa above the age of 18 on Facebook. That works out to about 0.2% of the users on FB, from SA actually bothered to become a fan of the brand. In my mind, that’s a bit of a flop.

Why this could be perceived to be a successful campaign

Theoretically what we could be looking at here is quality over quantity. Involvement and activity over masses of inactive users/fans.

But let’s look at this for a moment before we get ahead of ourselves. The available features on the FB page of Doritos are: Notes, Photos, Video, Wall Comments, Events and Discussion Board.

To analyse these in a bit more detail:

Wall
313 posts

Discussion Board
Topic 1: 120 posts by 95 people
Topic 2: 29 posts by 25 people

Videos
12 fan videos

Photos
44 photos
5 albums

Events
Event 1 - 6 confirmed guests, 4 wall posts
Event 2 - 28 confirmed guests, 6 wall posts

Notes
7 notes
144 comments

Looking at the above breakdowns I honestly cannot say that all the money Doritos must have spent on their mainstream ad campaigns was worth it. 44 photographs and 12 videos is really not a good response in my opinion. Especially considering that there are ±1500 people in the group and over 750 000 people in SA on FB. That means that less than 1% of the fans on the page posted a video and almost 3% of the fans posted a photograph.

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve posted, viewed and commented on hundreds of photos on FB, that should’ve been the saving grace but alas, it wasn’t.

What Doritos could have done differently

Expanded their “moment of boldness” campaign to an online network of viral campaigns. Blogs, videos, podcasts and “fake events” that could have boosted the reputation of the brand for the young and socially in touch.

I can picture the blog and videos now; South Africans all over filming their moment of boldness, recording fake jumps, dares and ironic, satirical parodies of the “bold” factor.

Doritos could have done more with their Facebook group. Updates, invites, ads, coupons, giveaways, freebies. Sometimes it just takes a bit of gritty interaction to spread the word for a fan page, not an entire radio ad campaign. Other than giveaways the Doritos fan page gave nothing to its members. No community offering. I know a lot of people who feel an affinity to Doritos, it’s their choice chip, but they were not enticed to join this group. People like Apple Students has it right on their page. They have a community, not a product.

Below the line marketing would have worked better. Get bloggers involved, send them a box of crisps and ask them to eat them, rally a party around the chips, get other bloggers in on it and spread the word slowly to all their readers via the subsequent posts.

Print would even have worked better than radio. More people will sit near a computer while reading a newspaper/magazine than will be listening to the radio, so why put it on the radio? You are probably driving in your car when you hear about the Doritos fan page, not sitting by a pc with internet access. Bad move.

I did try to contact Doritos, the admin of the group or anyone but no one responded. I gave them a few working days. I’d love to know if they consider this campaign to be successful or if they are looking in to recovering from the flop that I see?

What do you think of this advert?

Visit Mail & Guardian Online now to have a look at the advert.

I am in two minds. Initially I hated the concept, but then, it’s not so bad really. It’s effective, interesting and different. Plus it can be closed at any moment if you can find the relevant button.

What a Brilliant advert, snapped it on my way home tonight:

The Mweb part of the advert reads: “MWEB PARENTAL GUIDANCE”.

For those of you who haven’t seen the Teasers ad campaign - where have you been? - the ad below the mweb one has a revealing picture of a woman on the side…Mweb seems to be capitalising on this by placing their advert for their online parental guidance service over the Teasers ad.

Sheer brilliance. But I wonder if Teasers needed to give Mweb permission or how the situation works? Any have an answer?

Vottle has pumped some serious moola in to their advertising campaign recently. I think we have all heard them on 5fm or whichever other radio station it was.

Yet I am left a bit baffled and bemused at their approach to blogging. They clearly believe they have a massive product if they are willing to pump money in to their campaign. They clearly have the money to do this, but they have a BLOGGER blog?

Not only is the website a .com url, which means they have a hosting package attache to that .com, but they most probably have a great big hosting package to cope with the traffic they built up over the ad campaigns. So I ask you, where is the .com/blog blog? What are you thinking?

Blogger might have been cool a couple of ages ago, but now blogger blogs are filled with porn, spam and clutter. .com blogs are the way forward, .co.za blogs are a very suitable substitute, but a blogger.com blog is not acceptable. They might have redirected the blog to “blog.vottle.com” But they have chosen to keep the Blogger template. This really makes no sense to me.

I suppose that any online presence in the form of a blog is better than no online presence. But surely an ONLINE company knows better and knows about better services?

Lock it up and throw away the key. Get a Wordpress blog.

I have been listening with great frustration to the Pepsi radio advert campaign. I am frustrated because I actually prefer drinking Pepsi to Coke.

The adverts on the radio sound something like this:

I Love Pepsi, but what if we Pepsi together and our Pepsi doesn’t Pepsi properly then we’ll have a Pepsi and our Pepsi’s will be Pepsied. So lets not Pepsi tonight, let’s wait till the Pepsi and Pepsi when we are properly Pepsied. But the Pepsi might not be Pepsi then and our Pepsi will be Pepsied for Pepsi. What a Pepsi if our Pepsi doesn’t Pepsi like it used to Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi.

You get the idea.

I think it so unbelievably ridiculous that this actually counts as advertising. This is subliminal advertising without the subliminal part. This campaign shamelessly lacks creativity and innovation in my opinion. It simply spews out mindless words that force you to say the word Pepsi, think the word Pepsi and talk about the stupid advert from Pepsi. There is no choice here, there is no option, there is no thought behind it there is just…Pepsi. And it disappoints me.

There will be those people responding to this post who will argue that the advert does its job because even though I hate it, I am still posting about it. True. The advert does its job, and oh so well but this is what I find problematic. As consumers we love stupid things like this, we allow marketers to make us look moronic and mindless. We (myself included) do not stand up and shun the advert, complain or boycott the product.

I am not an idiot and refuse to let marketers and brand managers at Pepsi think that I am one. I will not be drinking Pepsi, they have lost a client and I hope I am not alone on this one.