The Lowdown is Ad Age's weekly look at news nuggets from
across the world of marketing, including trends, campaign tidbits,
executive comings and goings and more.
Wendy's has struck social media gold thanks to
a Nevada teenager. If you haven't heard of #NuggsforCarter by now
you must not be on Twitter. The hashtag began rising in popularity
after high-schooler Carter Wilkerson innocently
sent this tweet:
Yo @Wendys how many retweets for a
year of free chicken nuggets?
As of midday Wednesday, Mr. Wilkerson's screenshot of his
exchange with Wendy's has garnered more than 2.6 million retweets,
ranking it as the second-most
retweeted tweet, according to Favstar. He only trails
Ellen DeGeneres's famous Oscars
selfie tweet from 2014, which has 3.35 million retweets. VML
projects Mr. Wiklerson's tweet will eclipse Ellen's tweet.
Mr. Wilkerson looks like a budding marketing executive. He has
seized on the publicity by launching his own website where he is
selling apparel like #NuggsforCarter T-shirts.
Carter has seized on the publicity by selling apparel like this T-shirt.
"Clean" ingredients have been big in food marketing, but not so
much in toothpaste. Hello is out to change that
with a campaign breaking today from its new (since January) agency
72andSunny, greenlighted by its new (since
December) VP-Marketing Joshua Nafman. "An
Inconvenient Tooth," a 1:45 animated film, follows "Toothy" as he
reveals that some toothpastes have synthetic dyes, saccharin, and
propylene glycol, which in its industrial grade form is used to
de-ice airplanes and in its pharmaceutical form is used to help
make toothpaste foam. Hello's products use none of those. Some do
have fluoride, and in 2015 Hello settled litigation with
Crest marketer Procter & Gamble Co. over its former "99%
Natural" labeling of fluoride products. With this ad, part of an
effort that will play out on Facebook,
Instagram,YouTube and through
various influencers, Hello steered clear of another biting
controversy by not highlighting an ingredient in Colgate-Palmolive
Co.'s Total toothpaste --
triclosan -- which the Food and Drug
Administration is phasing out of soap over safety
concerns. A spokeswoman said Hello preferred to concentrate on
ingredients found across multiple brands. But the important thing
is just talking about ingredients, said Mr. Nafman, citing research
showing people think more about what's in their food, beauty and
even cleaning supplies than their toothpaste.
OGX, the cornerstone of Johnson &
Johnson's acquisition of upstart personal-care marketer
Vogue International last year, has its first campaign from new
social-creative agency of record Juniper ParkTBWA and media shop J3. "It's a true disruption in a very
conventional category," said Alan Madill, chief
creative officer of the Juniper ParkTBWA, aiming to inspire women
to "fall in love with their look." The campaign will play out on
Facebook and Instagram this spring and summer (notably, not
YouTube, where J&J has paused spending over brand safety
concerns). The launch video can be found on Vimeo.
It's not just the NFL and food marketers
anymore -- Bayer, owner of
Claritin, would also like you to send your kids
outside to play. The brand cites an analysis by Columbia
University finding that Americans spend 95% of their time
indoors. In a new "Be an Outsider" campaign from Energy BBDO, Claritin notes that a children's
dictionary today includes such words as "broadband," and "Wi-Fi"
but not "dandelion" and "fern." The video asks people to try
spending just an additional 1% of their time outside. Of course, if
the kiddos and parents happen to catch a whiff of allergens and
sneeze while they're at it, prompting them to try a market-leading
antihistamine, well, all the better.
Sometimes a butter churn is just a butter churn, as Freud might
have said, had he thought about it. That's true in the
Spectrum cable markets of New York, Los Angeles
and San Diego at least, and now also in Comcast Spotlight's Chicago market.
Boy Butter's in-house ad featuring beefy
apron-clad Seth Fornea churning butter, had been
accepted to run last month on VH-1 in those Spectrum markets during
Rupaul's "Drag Race." But Eyal
Feldman, CEO of the lubricant marketer, got the impression
that Comcast's legal
department nixed his ad for Chicago. He complained bitterly about
it
in a blog post. Not so, according to a person familiar with the
matter, who last week told Lowdown it was just a mixup over
restrictions against local placements on Logo, which also carries
the show. At any rate, Boy Butter is now free to churn away in
Chicago too, according
to Mr. Feldman.
