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Frucor and Colenso BBDO harness the creativity of the crowd with ‘Give It a V’

From cones on the Sky Tower to golf ball battle cart ads to motion-controlled music to Xbox giveaways for Call of Duty players to V Robbers where gamers could win part of 100K, Frucor has evolved its marketing of the fizzy green stuff to include its audience more and more. And now it’s even asking them to come up with the next campaign.

As is says on the site: “Over the years we’ve given stuff a V and crazy things have happened. Now it’s up to you to provide the inspiration. Give us a word, any word, and we could end up giving that thing a V.” 

People can leave anonymous suggestions on the V homepage, or make suggestions via Twitter or Facebook. Suggestions that have been shared so far on the Facebook page have included ‘Give sheepdog trials a V’, ‘Give grandma a V’, ‘Give Bebo a V’ and ‘Give a symphony orchestra a V’. 

“We have a clear message to articulate: get something, give it a V and surprise and delight customers that way,” says Claire Gutzewitz, senior brand manager of Energy at Frucor,

Involving the crowd in marketing campaigns is an evolving trend (The Zoo’s Giles Tuck discussed some of the world’s best examples of social creativity at a recent presentation). And Gutzewitz says making a shift to include the consumer more in the creation of V’s campaigns will hopefully mean they’re relating to consumer groups more by getting them to choose what they are interested in.

“It’s a two-way conversation, and that way we get lots more content that we can use, too”.

Gutzewitz says the idea stemmed from V’s history of campaigns.

“We’ve been doing awesome stuff with V for ages, and we wanted to articulate that – that is, we’ve been applying the ‘Give it a V’ scope to things all along, to give things high energy. This is what the products stands for.”

The campaign pulls content from old campaigns, such as the battle carts, into it. “We’re saying ‘we’ve done it before, and the consumer can decide what’s next’,” says Gutzewitz.

She says so far they’ve had a lot of political suggestions as the elections ramp up, with lots of politicians’ names cropping up. Although the suggestions on the website are anonymous when submitted, she can tell by the tangents people go off on with subsequent posts that a few people are submitting more than one idea at once (there’s also been plenty of suggestions on Facebook).

After the ideas have been harvested, Frucor will be partnering with MediaWorks during the creation of whichever stunts end up being picked, but she couldn’t give more details at this stage.

Next month will bring an end to the invitation phase, and creation will kick off after that.

V’s last campaign was the V Head campaign, where consumers could choose which $20,000 experience they wanted, out of MotorHead, MusicHead, TechHead or AdventureHead (Pepsi ran a similar campaign a few years back and then got gored by the anti bullfighting brigade). Gutzewitz says the V Head promotion correlated with a 20 percent upswing in sales of V Green, outperforming the V Robbers campaign of the previous year.

“This was probably because it was a broader target audience,” she says.

And if it needs a campaign for next year, might we suggest the developing trend of brain buzzing

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