Brandcasting with Snapple and WFNX
Jay Coleman, EMCI President, organized a deal that took WFNX-FM Boston commercial free for six weeks this summer, with Snapple as sole sponsor. He calls the promotion "brandcasting," and it's gotten quite a bit of interest from broadcasters.
EMCI is an entertainment and music marketing company that's been in business since 1976. First known as Rock Bill, the company invented tour sponsorship in 1981 with the Rolling Stones and still represents them, most recently with Radio Shack sponsoring the new Rolling Stones Tour this fall. EMCI also put Pepsi and Michael Jackson together and handled that relationship for 10 years. They've done hundreds and hundreds of tie-ins between the music industry and major national brands all over the world.
Here, we asked Jay about the brandcasting part of his business, along with some of the details on this past summer's deal with Snapple and 'FNX.
Tell us about "Brandcasting," as with Snapple and WFNX.
First of all we believe that this concept works extremely well for certain types of products-ones that the consumers buy on a regular basis if not every day you know multiple times a week. Obviously Snapple surely fits into that category. A lot of what this is about for a brand is profile, top-of-mind awareness, a positive imagery. Products like beverages make a whole lot of sense, whether they are alcoholic or non-alcoholic. I think big major retailer is a good one where there is a high frequency of visits; a fast food company. The goal is to play up brands, products and services that a consumers uses all the time, vs. for example maybe an automotive product; a car company where maybe at any one time only a small percentage of the population is in the market to buy a car. Everybody drinks beverages all the time. Everybody eats at fast food restaurants and orders pizzas and things like that.
What demos are recommended for this sort of promotion?
I think everybody would love to see no commercials or a heck of a lot less commercials on commercial radio. No one says, "God I can't wait to hear the next five minutes of commercials on radio." It's a necessary evil to allow people to have free programming. I think beyond that everybody would love to see less commercials or no commercials, if the economic model works. I think that no matter what age group you are no one; with people being bombarded by advertising every which way they look, to the extent that we can lessen the load in radio it's going to make it a more attractive medium. I believe for individual stations and individual formats, the ones that tend to have less advertising I would think are going to ultimately get a better share.
What is the Brandcasting model?
The key is you start off and you say, "Look we all know that commercial free is a magic term in the business to launch a station or to get people to listen, but recognizing that that economics is something that most stations can't sustain for a long period of time." The brandcasting idea is obviously one that is a real hybrid. I think one that is sustainable economically because depending on how you structure the deal with the sponsor, it can provide maybe not all the revenue you'd have if you were running a full commercial load but for a promotional period-whether it's three months, six months or maybe even longer-I believe a station can really obtain dominance in a market that way through this concept of having a sponsor as a partner. It's part of making a lot of noise and it's part of communicating it and doing it with enough time and intensity that it, like anything else there's a certain amount, with so much clutter today in the market it takes time for people to capture the message.
The second part of it is the contextual aspect on the air. Once you make the decision to go into something like this I think you need to carefully integrate the brand in a way that it's done in a fun, clever way-so if you cut your commercial load down from 15-minutes an hour to four or five minutes with one brand, I think you need to weave the brand through in a way that can add some fun and excitement to the station. What we did in Boston to stay within what we believe are "commercial free" is we stayed away from any thematic advertising at all. You know the typical jingles and pre-produced spots.
All of the brand messaging was done by the DJ's and it was all designed around providing fun and added value to the consumer. So it was show up for a Snapple Concert and get in with five bottle caps. Today the temperature goes over 90-look for free Snapple at specific locations around the city. Things like that whereby the messaging would be looked at as not what one would think of as traditional commercials. Not only do you have this brandcasting model but you can characterize it as a relatively "commercial free" platform.
Tomorrow: How did he put Snapple/Cadbury together with WFNX?
