Thursday, March 29, 2007

An experiment in viral marketing...

Right before Christmas last semester, 4 of my Adcenter friends and I went out for beers at a local bar, and got to talking about brands that haven't put money into advertising in many years, and therefore are dying. We thought about how amazing it would be if we, as students, were able to get young kids excited about a dying brand. We also thought about how we could use very little money to do it.

We came up with MoonPie Madness. MoonPie hasn't advertised in many years, and they are seen as an old, nostalgic brand. Something that you have once every five years while thinking, "Wow, I haven't had one of these since I was a little kid." MoonPie also hasn't tried to get the new generation of young people excited about their product at all. Hence the term "dying brand."

We decided to create the largest MoonPie eating tournament in history. We obviously didn't have any money, so we got local sponsors to donate in exchange for their logo being on the tshirt. March Madness was coming up in a few months, so we decided to leverage the fact that VCU was having a great season and probably would make March Madness. Little did we know that they would beat Duke and be the highlight of the first round of the tournament.

MoonPie Madness is this Sunday, April 1st. We've been spending almost all of our free time on this for the past 2 months, but it's all worth it. We were at first worried that we wouldn't have enough competitors. Now we have so many that we've decided to have an exhibition round for the people who don't get to be in the brackets.

Check it out. Let me know what you think. I'll let you know how it goes after Sunday.

www.moonpiemadness.com.

I recommend you look at all of the multimedia links. But definitely check out "TV Spot #1." It's my commercial acting debut.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

A serious game of Rock Paper Scissors

I went up to New York City a week ago to search for a job in advertising, and I stayed with my old college buddy Brent in Hoboken, New Jersey on Thursday night. We went to this restaurant/bar to get some food and be tempted to have some beers. We resisted, though, since I had an interview on Friday.

Around the end of our meal, we started hearing a female voice yelling repeatedly, "Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!" "Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!" As soon as we were done eating, we went to investigate, and we found a young woman in a referee outfit with a decently sized crowd around her, and two people staring each other down in a game of Rock Paper Scissors. We looked at the bracket and realized that this was a full 64-person tournament being put on by the USARPS League. That's right, everybody, there's an official national Rock Paper Scissors League, and it's sponsored by (no surprise here) Bud Light! Check it out at http://www.usarps.com/!

There were still a few spots open in the bracket, so without hesitation, we joined the tourney. Let me tell you, it was an intense hour after that. I found myself watching my future opponents to get some strategy on them: "Ahh OK, he always throws rock after throwing paper. Gotta remember that for next round."

Brent and I ended up getting paired up against each other in the Sweet 16 round. For those 5 minutes, we were no longer friends. We were rivals. Alas, Brent beat me, and went on to the Elite 8, where he lost to a girl! The championship was two girls going up against each other, and everyone in the bar was very much on one side or the other in their cheering.

I had no idea that there was an official Rock Paper Scissors League. But it goes to show how obsessed we are with competition in our country. Even though it was all in good fun, people were getting pretty intense. I now know that you can find just about any type of game, and if you put it in the right setting and make it sound official, you can get people excited.

Oh, and the interview went pretty well too.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

"It's half in tab, half in music..."

I was walking back home from school one night when I passed 2 guys playing guitars outside on their porch. They stopped the song they were on, and one guy started teaching the other guy a new song. He said that "it was hard to learn, because it was in half tab and half music."

For those of you not familiar with the guitar-playing world, "tab" is short for "tablature", which is a form of writing down how to play guitar chords as a series of numbers and lines, where your fingers stand for each number 1-4 and they form the shapes on the guitar "grid." This came about as an easy way to teach people guitar on the internet, where actually creating a musical score can be very hard.

The issue here is that many kids today learn the guitar by only reading tab. They never learn how to read music at all, and only see the chords as numbers on a grid. Because of this, many guitarists lack the music theory training that is essential to be a great guitarist.

Which brings me to my question: With more and more kids deciding to only read tab and never take actual musical lessons, will the quality and complexity of guitar music go down in the future? Who's fault is this? Is it the kid's fault for being lazy? Or is it the parents' fault for not teaching the importance of reading musical notes? Also, will there be less and less kids playing other musical instruments besides the guitar because they only took the time to learn guitar tab instead of musical notes, which is not transferable to other instruments?

How can we stop this from happening? First off, parents, teach the importance of music theory at a very young age. Secondly, petition your local school to make sure that music classes are not further de-emphasized in this age of focus on only math, science, and arithmetic.

In fifteen years, if our kids only know math, science, and arithmetic, and they aren't cultured in music, it will be a very sad time to live in.