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Colenso hits viral jackpot once again with new Mountain Dew-inspired extreme sport

Youtube VideoIt’s obviously a day to celebrate the peddling of sugary beverages. Colenso’s latest V campaign for Frucor just took out the May edition of Colmar Brunton’s Ad Impact Award and, to welcome three new flavours of Mountain Dew to the Frucor stable, the agency also just launched what its managing director Nick Garrett believes is the best thing they’ve done in years: skate pinball.

It all kicked off on Saturday in a Henderson warehouse with a skate pinball tournament featuring 30 of New Zealand’s top skaters. The park is now open to the public until 26 June and riders can register to have a go in Single Player Mode via the website. High scores are recorded—as is your run via a fixed camera—and added to the leaderboard.

Mountain Dew has a reputation for making testosterone-rich, high-energy ads (and, slightly ironically, given the extreeeeeme angle its advertising has often taken, for appealing to typically low-energy gamers) and account director Tim Ellis says it’s pretty close to V in terms of its target market. As such, it’s a similar advertising idea: create something so damn cool it gets talked about.

He doesn’t know how many people were involved in the construction but it cost less than $500,000 to build, with the associated events costs and media on top of that. But the best bit is that FOUR saw value in the idea as content and came onboard to film proceedings.

FOUR followed the build with twice weekly updates on the Drew & Shannon Live show and this culminates in a 30 minute show that was filmed by production company Satin and Lace and will air in June while the park is still open. They also shot the TVC (high-energy soundtrack courtesy of Wellington band Tough Love) with the assistance of art director/director Jae Morrison, he of controversial Levi’s viral fame, who was responsible for the impressive making of video.

Youtube Video In what could be seen as good news for agencies with a cool enough idea, MediaWorks seems to have jumped on this ‘advertising as content’ bandwagon recently, with Special Group’s Smirnoff Night Project screening recently and plans afoot to show a documentary about three Unitec students later in the year.

Ellis says the campaign has had a really good viral pick-up so far, with an item that screened on TVNZ’s sports news last week being picked up by CNN World Report and a host of regional and international TV networks. As expected, it’s also gone pretty crazy online.

Colenso are getting good pretty damn good at this viral caper. But, as Ellis says, success depends entirely on how good the idea is. And this one is a good’un.

 

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