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Behind the Work in association withThe Immortal Awards
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Your Shot: Mentos ‘Fresh News’

31/07/2013
Advertising Agency
London, UK
512
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BBH Creative Director Pablo Marques brings Anchorman to Facebook

Do you love lamp? Champing at the bit for the forthcoming Anchorman sequel? Well we suspect that the new project from BBH and Mentos might be just the thing to fill the Ron Burgundy-shaped hole in your life. ‘Fresh News’ is a personalised news channel that trawls your social media profile to create headline gold.  Creative Director Pablo Marques talks to Addison Capper about the short-term development of Fresh News and the long-term plans of the ‘Mentos Fresh Filter’. 


LBB> What was the brief from the client and what were your initial thoughts when you saw it?


PM> Mentos is entering an ‘always-on’ approach to social in order to engage a core youth audience online and land their brand positioning ‘Stay Fresh’. Part of the on-going task is to also build the long-term platform at MentosFreshFilter.com.


The brief for Fresh News was to create fame for the brand with an experience that was inherently shareable; one that lived the ‘Stay Fresh’ positioning and one that would also drive traffic to their other online properties.


There wasn’t a specific point that Mentos briefed us with per se, as we’d co-collaborated heavily on the overall approach to social communications. In many respects we helped define the brief and what it needed to achieve. 


LBB> What were the key insights that drove this campaign and how long did it take from idea to conception?


PM> The Mentos core audience is very Facebook savvy. This new generation is very keen to use social media to project their sense of self online. We knew we had to create something with Facebook at the heart of it. With that in mind we set off to create something that would enable users to amplify that behaviour. 


From the moment the idea was there, it was a matter of finding a production partner, writing the algorithms, shooting the films and then putting everything together. There was also the client approval process (for 45 minutes of final footage), extensive testing and this open beta phase we are in now. Altogether it took us about six months from idea to completion.


LBB> How did the 'Stay Fresh' strap line develop into this Anchorman style 'Fresh News'?


PM> Stay Fresh is our end line but it’s also an encapsulation of our wider brand positioning. It advocates ‘freshness’ and lives that through everything we do and create, from our products to our communications. It’s this positioning and our core values of ‘fun, new and surprising’ that form the starting point from which Fresh News came.


As pointed out before, Mentos’ core audience includes people who use Facebook very heavily. They often use the social network as a way of building an external digital persona. Creating something that would enable them to publish something nice about themselves to their social graph seemed to be a good fit. On top of that we were also very interested in generative storytelling and any projects where people and algorithms collaborate to create something altogether new. We wanted to do digital work that had powerful storytelling imbued in it, but that was also participative in nature with a clear central role for the user. 


This was the right opportunity for this kind of work. We tried as much as possible to make it feel magical and personal and to ensure it had the right emotional sensibilities and a good sense of humour. Of course that’s just the sort of thing that isn’t normally particularly easy to achieve in projects of this nature.


To be completely honest the original idea wasn’t to create a news channel, but to take aim at a different format altogether. We wanted to do something more like a ‘bio’ channel parody, one of those shows where B-rated celebs comment on the life of the A-rated ones. But that’s already too funny, so it is hard to really parody – there would be no comedic tension. The format of a news channel came at the very end. It was funny and gave us something more serious to parody. That increased the comedy factor by increasing the tension.


We also really liked the idea of something called Mentos Fresh News. It made it feel current and instantaneous and enabled us to start pushing ‘fresh’ in new directions.


LBB> What was the research and design process like for this campaign?


PM> We first had to spend some time with the application programming interfaces (APIs) that we were going to use, things like Foursquare, Spotify, Facebook and others. We are reasonably versed on their potential and utility but we had to really spend time understanding them inside-out.


Once that was done we sat down and wrote a bunch of algorithms to derive meaning from users’ activity on those platforms. It was like writing a small bit of artificial intelligence. The concept itself was based on what video game companies do to create convincing commentators on sports games.


Finally, with the algorithms in hand, we just had to write the gags, which we wrote in collaboration with the director and Tony Law – the comedy actor playing Ted Toledo. 


LBB> 'Fresh News' was built using the latest technology platforms - can you tell us a bit more about that and what it involves?


PM> We used a bunch of APIs. In addition to Facebook we also used Foursquare to check if the places users checked into were rated high or low, or where these places were located. We used Google Street View to get pictures of the places people had been to. We used Spotify to see what people had been listening to and to check if artists were popular or not. We used the programme ‘Acapela’ to generate the text-to-speech voice of Gary. When no dynamic data is being used we also dubbed that over the lip-syncing actor to create the feeling that it is actually his voice.


There were numerous tricks that used a combination of different platforms that merged seamlessly. And at the end of the process we also had to create and composit a seamless video every time. That was achieved by using beta software from a firm called Impossible Software. They were massively helpful. I thoroughly recommend them to any kind of dynamic video compositing like this. 


LBB> Strategically, what do you think 'Fresh News' can achieve for Mentos, as a brand?


PM> Fame, brand likeability, spreading the new ways in which we are looking at the word ‘fresh’, helping us disseminate the new ‘stay fresh’ line digitally. Driving traffic to our social channels, on which we can engage with users on the long term. All of those, but we also really need to move Mentos away from only being represented by online films of people chucking the mint into a bottle of Diet Coke.


LBB> What were the most challenging aspects of this project and how did you overcome them?


PM> There were many obstacles to overcome. Technology was one of them. We knew this was possible, we just didn’t really know how good we could make it. Taking that leap of faith was scary but we have brave and supporting clients that push us to do great creative work.


There were a few scary moments throughout the process. There was a lot of prototyping and iterating along the way. We approached it more like product development than the way you normally approach advertising campaigns. That was crucial to make sure we could deliver on the vision.


LBB> Are there more aspects to the 'Stay Fresh' campaign that we can look forward to?


PM> ‘Stay Fresh’ is going to be a fruitful brand proposition. There is already stuff starting on our fresh filter platform and we also have quite a few other fun things cooking. We really expect this to be the beginning of a fun journey to make Mentos even more loved, famous and relevant online, which is key for speaking to the brand’s core audience.

 

Credits

 

Client name and title: Corrado Bianchi, International Marketing Director, Perfetti Van Melle
 

BBH Creative Team: Viv Yapp & AK Parker, Daniel Schaefer & Szymon Rose
 

BBH Creative Director: Pablo Marques & Marc Hatfield
 

BBH Digital Producer: Paul Malecki
BBH TV Producer: Glenn Paton
BBH Head of Digital Production: Josh Tenser
BBH Head of Creative Technology: Alex Matthews
BBH UX: Matt Bertocchi
BBH Strategic Business Lead: Richard Lawson
BBH Strategy Director: Ben Shaw
BBH Strategist: Jamie Watson
BBH Team Director: Rowena Minhas, Tom Woodhead
BBH Team Manager: Lauren Blunden

 
Production Company: Stink Digital
Director: Brian Lee Hughes
Executive Producer:Tessa Christou  
Producer: Tania Zemljak
DoP: Ray Coates
Post Production: Stink Digital
Editor/Editing House: Final Cut
Sound: Joe @ 750mph
Sound Engineer: Joe Marsden

 

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