Mentos to Launch Geyser Video Contest
After Mentos caught wind of all this video that displayed explosive geysers when Mentos and Diet Coke are combined, Mentos said, "Cool. This is great." Coke, apparently suffering from some sort of refusal to believe the way advertising message are conveyed have changed dramatically said, "It's an entertaining phenomenon. We would hope people want to drink more than try experiments with it." Right. Anyway, Mentos is leveraging (oh, I hate that word) the trendlet and will launch the Mentos Geyser Video Contest in mid-July. As B.L. Ochman reports, the contest will encourage people to send in their best videos of the mixture and, presumably, win prizes for their efforts. Coke, on the other hand, will likely sit this one out but, at the same time, thanks Mentos for encouraging people to buy Diet Coke. Yup, it's a win-win.
Comments
Seeing as it works with any diet cola, not just diet coke, i'd say this is a good opportunity for Pepsi to make a move.
dm
Looks to me like Mentos isn't interested in being anyone else's fetch-puppy: They obviously know that the geyser works on more than just one certain brand-name carbondated beverage; and even suggest using other liquids by putting two different-colored bottles on their graphic. If I enter, I will probably go for a rainbow of geysers; and I'd bet I'm not the only one to think that could be an edge. If the beverage-I-am-not-naming had realized the potential of this, they'd be a part of the Mentos contest and get all the benefit for themselves. Besides, you can still see the bottle labels; the Mentos identity is merely implied by the geyser!
I think they are brilliant! Since the Diet Coke stunt first hit I have seen it repeated at three race tracks and have seen Mentos all over the place every time I have ventured back to talk with the drivers and or riders and their crews. I would milk the interest in this every way I could think of.
There was some coupon at Target a couple months ago for free or really cheap diet coke. People were buying car loads full of soda.
Edit, I found the link but no pics.
http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=274256
I think it might be funny to do it in public areas like outside a mall and video tape peoples expressions but I wouldnt want to get coke all over people.
now there's a good example of a company actually feeding on an internet phenominom instead of attacking it with their lawyers(cough, snl, cough, paramount)...kudos
yes but i think they could have done something more creative with the whole phenomenon. There already are more than 800 videos out there. Might be close to the interest-saturation point. And I do wonder if there's anything else people can do with Mentos besides make geysers.
I think you can eat Mentos too.
Even if I agree with BL's assessment that interest-saturation may be upon us, I'm still kind of impressed with the speed of Mentos reaction time. I mean, for a corporation it's a rather lightning quick attempt to capitalize on the situation. Unfortunately for them, it's still way on the slooooow side in terms of the Internet...
But no matter, I hope that the contest generates enough ROI so that Mentos, and other clients, are more willing to act upon this type of spontaneous phenomena in the future...
I'm still awaiting the first urban legend about the friend of a friend whose stomach exploded when he washed down a roll of Mentos with a can of Diet Coke.
Imagine how great it would be if Mentos started using that scenario in their advertising first? They would be the Gods of candy-eating young people. And first on every creative's new-client wish list.