Peek Freans is using a web-based soap opera, As the Cookie Crumbles, to introduce two new cookies in its healthy-living Lifestyle Selections line.
To promote its new Brown Sugar Blueberry with flax and Lime Coconut with probiotic cookies, the Kraft brand has developed an online soap opera at AsTheCookieCrumbles.ca, which centres on the ocean-side community of Glamora County and 10 of its residents.
Every Thursday at 3 p.m. for the next eight weeks, visitors to the site can catch a new episode and follow the unfolding storylines of characters like former exotic dancer Carmen, and cookie and tea sommelier Cameron, as they congregate at the local hangout Casa de Tea. In week seven, viewers can decide the characters’ fates by voting for one of three possible endings.
Peek Freans wants to provide a guilty pleasure for the nearly five million Canadians who watch soap operas every day, said senior product manager Farrah Bezner.
“What we’re trying to do is provide consumers with a little treat, and a way to indulge in the afternoon by watching a soap opera and having a Peek Freans Lifestyles Selections with it,” she said.
As the Cookie Crumbles, developed by MacLaren McCann’s Momentum, starts this Thursday, though a preview of the characters is online now.
The soap opera will be supported by direct mail, in-store sampling, Facebook and Flickr pages, as well as public relations.
An advertorial will also appear in the October issue of Chatelaine using the concept “Cookies so good, you’ll have to find other ways to be bad,” created by DraftFCB.
