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.
Yesterday, Jay talked about how he put Snapple/Cadbury together with WFNX (8/29/06 RBR #168).
What stations might be a good target for this?
To me this makes the most amount of sense for a couple of types of situations. One is you are in a very competitive format. You have a good signal, but yet you're pretty much sucking wind at the bottom of the heap and you're looking for something that will shake things up and hopefully change the playing field a little bit. No matter what the format is I think it depends on where you stand in the market from a rating perspective and I think if you have a strong signal and you're not generating the numbers, here's a way to kind of step back and kind of restage the station. That's also the perfect time to tweak your on-air sound; it just works together. It's one of those things that if you have a new look and a new sound but you were staying in the same format, come in with the brandcasting platform.
I think it also works well if you're taking a station to a whole new format-say an urban station and you're taking it to a Latino format. All of a sudden you're kind of changing its total personality. That's another good time where you're kind of like starting from scratch.
How do you transition the audience back in with a regular slate of commercials?
As people get used to having a very, very low commercial load, they are used to not listening to pre-produced spots and all of a sudden the ballgame is over, you're back, I think the idea here would be is to try to do it on a very gradual basis. The whole idea is if you start it, if you really see some growth in audience what you don't want to do is immediately polarize them because I think that's like shell shock. What you need to do is gradually go back up to what you need from an economic standpoint, to show profit, but maybe that's something you need to manage very well. And at the same time maybe you can find a situation where you work with different brands. Wouldn't it be wonderful if a station could say, "I've got for major sponsors for the year. Each one does a different season with me and we're known as the station in the market that never has a whole lot of commercials." In the summer it's a beverage. In the fall it's fast food. In the winter it's whatever. I think what you need to do is you need to find four major sponsors that will each one will work with you periodically during the year. That is a winning idea because each sponsor would take three months and you would build unique promotions, and as long as everybody is after the same demographic and as long as it's non-competitive.
Any other brands lining up to do similar things?
Well we're talking to several- beverages both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. We're talking to some major retailers now about the concept. It's a major amount of dollars and I think for certain brands doing this in every major market would be relatively unaffordable. It may be a brand says, "Alright I'm going to do this every three years in every major market I'm in." So you rotate this. It's like some companies where periodically they'll all of a sudden do a big blast of outdoor. They'll do that maybe once every couple of years just to elevate the brand; to do something sexy and different and exciting. I believe if there's enough advertisers in that pool, that's when you can start sustaining the model so that you can be totally supported by brandcasting and not necessarily like you have to shut it off one day and all of a sudden you go from no commercials to 15 minutes. You risk losing a lot of the goodwill that you just generated.
