I love Mentos’ most recent viral marketing initiative: MentosIntern.com. Props to Elizabeth Cannon, Mentos’ brand manager, and Paul Bichler, creative director at Bartle Hegarty, the agency that created the concept. According to Cakke, a blog focused on domain name values, MentosIntern.com is “the fastest-growing domain name we’ve ever seen” based on its generating more than 30,000 Google hits on the phrase “Trevor the Mentos intern” in less than three weeks. You don’t need Paris Hilton to say, “That’s hot.”
Check it out as covered by Advertising Age in its July 16, 2007 issue:
Mentos late last month hired Trevor Day, a sophomore University of Cincinnati drama student, as a virtual intern to do the world’s bidding from his cubicle in the company’s U.S. headquarters in Erlanger, Ky. People can call, e-mail or chat with him and enter jobs for him on his calendar at mentosintern.com.
Of course, the key ROI measure for the campaign is not the number of site hits necessarily, but rather the publicity generated from it. Coverage by Advertising Age, Star, US weekly and numerous blogs seems to indicate the campaign is working.
I hope we can persuade a few of our clients to embrace viral marketing and follow Mentos’ lead.
3 Comments
Hey, Kolbrener has a blog! Exciting stuff. I was just writing about the role of blogging in marketing too.
It’s amazing how big an impact viral marketing can have. People consider it to be a “new” form of marketing, when really it’s just an updated version of the oldest, word-of-mouth. If you make your product/company interesting, people will talk, email, blog, write, podcast, youtube, and all the other things people do nowadays. Viral marketing can do so much for so little. Good luck in persuading a few of your clients to embrace the trend!
George - Something that wasn’t mentioned in your post was this is more than a website about an intern, it is a social media campaign.
Aside from this website you can friend Trevor on MySpace & Facebook, read his blog on blogspot.com, play him on XBOX live, view his pictures on flickr.com, look up his videos on YouTube, and more. Search and you’ll find his pages on Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.
Remember the video circulating about dropping a Mentos into a Diet Coke, http://www.eepybird.com/dcm1.html? I do, and I found this interesting quote in another story about that viral video
They didn’t produce that video, yet they embraced it, and the communities powering the video’s success.
True, the ROI measure is the ultimate standard of success but…
Mentos had a specific goal with Trevor, to reach the demographic that use social media, and to get others talking about it.
And as you have eluded to, the mere fact people are writing about it, means they have succeeded.
Nice