iC Group - In The News

iC Group and Pepsi/Frito Lay Take Home PROMO IMA

The Xbox 360: one of the most sought after gifts of this past holiday season. What better prize to dangle prior to retail availability in a consumer promotion that garnered IC Group the top award for its work with Pepsi and Doritos.

The promotion paired Pepsi-Cola Canada and Frito Lay Canada for an online contest called Be First to Play. It offered the chance to win one Xbox 360 every hour during the contest period, which ran from Oct. 2, 2005 through Nov. 10, 2005. Each prize package included the gaming system, an Xbox game 3 and a “Party in a Box,” which included a variety of Xbox products and coupons for Pepsi and Doritos products. The total value of the prize pool was close to $300,000 (Canadian).

“For us, it’s all about trying to drive volume by driving that repeat purchase,” says Katherine Tmeg, marketing manager, for Pepsi-QTG Canada.

To play, consumers purchased specially marked Pepsi and Doritos products and registered a unique PIN number at the promotion site to enter the sweepstakes for that hour’s draw. The chance to win once per hour drew plenty of activity, with more than 1.6 million unique visits and more than 2.9 million sweeps entries. The average number of entries per hour was more than 3,000, with an average visit time of 11.2 minutes.

Two major goals of the promotion were to drive increased display distribution of the program, as well as gain a larger space on the retail floor to increase sales (a number Pepsi holds close to the vest), says Kelly Crerar, senior VP-strategy, IC Group, Chicago and Winnipeg, Canada. “

Just by showing [retailers] what was expected in sales numbers gave the retailer the comfort that if they had more product in stock they would sell it,” Crerar says.

The promotion was available in every channel where the Pepsi and Doritos products were sold, from major retailers to local gas stations. In some account specific programs the displays took up entire walls with 12-packs stacked from floor to ceiling. To add a creative twist, built within the stacked cases consumers could read the word “Xbox.”

“This promotion really gave us something to go to our customers with and leverage that to get the huge displays and the sort of size displays we’re accustomed to having, say, during Super Bowl,” Tmeg says. “It really generated a lot of buzz and excitement at the retail level and with consumers.

Print, broadcast, Internet and in-store materials supported.

—Patricia Odell, PROMO Magazine