Dairy cooperative Agropur wants milk to be cool for teens, and to do so, it is using social media for the first time.
Last week, Agropur launched a campaign in Quebec and Ontario for its Sealtest and Québon brands. The star of the campaign is a cow named Mona, appearing on packaging, on POP materials and on Facebook, where she will lick your profile picture.
“Our research shows that people drink less milk as they get older,” said Rodrigo Padilla, marketing director for the Natrel brand. “This is why we are focusing our campaign on adolescents.
“This is our first foray on Facebook, and instead of creating Natrel or Sealtest pages, we decided to go with a character to be less in your face.”
Enter mooing Mona, the face of the “Win a Cow” contest. All the brands’ milk and chocolate milk cartons bear the colours of the contest and lead to the microsite MonaMania.ca, where participants can enter a PIN code to claim instant prizes.
The grand prize is not really the cow, but a cash prize that increases in value according to the number of “likes” on Mona’s Facebook page. Each “like” represents $2, and the prize can go up to $10,000.
The microsite also uses Facebook Connect to prolong the playful experience offered on the site. Users can ask Mona questions (such as “Which of my friends would be a great farmer… outside of Farmville?”) and she chooses an answer from among the user’s Facebook friends. The user can then share with the friend in question.
Another function lets the user “kiss” Mona. She will lick the profile picture, leaving behind a trace of drool. The microsite also has an educational section, written in a light and humorous tone.
“Milk is not a very cool drink for teens, so if we wanted to increase its cool factor, we had to use the kind of humour they like, and call on the absurd and zany,” said Julie Dubé, vice-president, client services and a managing director at LG2, which created the entire operation.
“Our objective is not to focus so much on the grand prize, but rather to get young people to talk about this funny promotion,” she said. “The fact that the prize amount increases with the number of likes is also a way to create a craze.”
The agency is counting on word-of-mouth, but also on the POP and the packaging.
“The campaign is really focused on the packaging and the web,” said Dubé. “We only labeled the individual portion cartons in order to target teens, who are the big consumers in the ‘to go’ category, and not their mothers.”
Among the cartons identified, 5,005 win an instant prize. The winners are notified by the sound of a bell when they open the carton. There is no milk in these containers, just a bag of saline water and a coupon redeemable for another carton of milk plus the winning code to enter on the site.
Jean Landry and Gabrielle Godbout created the campaign. Jennifer Varvaresso and Jean-François Perreault created the web executions.
