Recently, Adweek.com (a marketing news website) posted an interesting article about Jeffrey Dachis who has created “a database which analyzes, rates, and ranks the social media activities of 20,000 companies and 26,000 brands”. The idea is that this index can become useful to brands by providing in-depth analytics tailored to a client company on how to most effectively spend its social media dollars. This article made me think about an advertising campaign that was recently brought to my attention by Adfreak.com, an affiliated blog of Adweek that brings innovative marketing ads to attention. The campaign was JELL-O’s Pudding Face.
JELL-O’s Pudding Face ad campaign involves associating its brand with the emoticon: 🙂 . To do this, JELL-O monitors twitter feeds on their website. There are two sides to the site, statuses containing 🙂 and statuses contain 🙁 with the ratio of happy to sad faces changing the interactive face in the middle. JELL-O purposes that it is “measure[ing] the mood of the nation and reflect[ing] it in the big JELL-O Pudding Face. So now…you can tell if America’s in need of a little pudding or sporting a great big Pudding Face”. Anytime the pudding face starts to dip the company “quickly deploy[s] free pudding to the frowners via Twitter to bring our collective mood right back up again”. The pudding face was also on display on a New York billboard. JELL-O ran television ads, as well, but the results were frightened viewers.
On the social business index, Kraft Foods Inc. (the corporation JELL-O is a part of) has a
ranking of 13 overall making it one of the top performers with a score of 994, due to campaigns like JELL-O’s. If Kraft utilizes the social business index to create new campaigns their social media percentage will rise and more people, like Adfreak.com, will blog about their innovative social media marketing strategy.