Care to Share? Digitas Launches Campaign for New Mars Candy
Video-heavy campaign includes branded content, video blogger sponsorships.
Video-heavy campaign includes branded content, video blogger sponsorships.
A new digital campaign for Gummi Burst, the latest addition to Mars’ Starburst candy line, has Digitas flexing its creative muscle in a number of ways.
Using the premise that the individually-wrapped candies are ideal for sharing, the “Share Something Juicy” features Starburst in a new animated Web series, a Starburst channel on YouTube featuring videos made by Digitas’s brand content unit The Third Act, and partnerships with several popular video bloggers.
“It really is a fresh look at their digital strategy,” said Digitas Senior VP of Marketing Todd Stanley. “It’s targeting a very fickle and hard-to-reach…audience for Starburst.”
Instead of attempting to herd its target audience to a central Web site, Stanley said, Digitas is distributing content through various avenues.
A Web series, “Nite Fite,” will be syndicated across the Web by NextNewNetworks. Created by Dan Meth and Mark Vitelli, the program is an animated evening talk show in which two characters, Penalty and Lloyd, battle over hot topics. Starburst Gummi Burst will be the sole sponsor/advertiser.
“The brand and what the brand stands for are organically woven into the series over the course of multiple episodes,” said John McCarus, VP Group Director of Third Act. “It lives in Starburst.com in its initial airing window. It also lives on NextNewNetworks and then it’s super-syndicated beyond that.”
The original, short videos being shown on a YouTube Starburst channel all involve sharing in some form, including people sharing insults and “oversharing” their true feelings. “The underpinning of this strategy is insight around this audience,” said Stanley. “They’re very willing and desirous of sharing. Sharing is the core element of this brand.”
Starburst has also sponsored several video bloggers, including David Choi, DavidJr.com, Katers17 and Rhett & Link. So far, two have produced content “designed to communicate the whole concept of sharing…in their own words and through their own eyes,” said McCarus.