Pepsi and Mentos

It's funny, it never occurred to me that Pepsi and Mentos would have the same effect as Coke and Mentos.






It certainly didn't have the same impact on search volumes (Coke, in blue, peaks in June and Pepsi doesn't).

The Coke and Mentos Meme

I expect that you're familiar with the dramatic outcomes from mixing Coke and Mentos mints. Tens of millions of people have watched thousands of different videos (almost 1,400 on Google Video alone) of people dropping Mentos into Coke bottles on all the major video sharing sites.



If you take a look at the search volumes for Coke Google Trends (below, in blue) there's a noticeable impact of the phenomenon. The global volume of searches is higher for Coke than at any other point in its history. The significance of this is hard to isolate, particularly as Trends doesn't offer a scale. For example, why would anyone search on Coke if they weren't looking for something like this? Coke, too, isn't the kind of brand that needs to benefit from increased awareness. It does, however, benefit from consideration and preference. Do these videos deliver this? If you consider Coke's efforts in digital music downloads and compare the quantity and quality of interaction with the brand I suspect that this meme is an extremely useful one for them.







Coke, however, is just half the equation. When you overlay the volume of searches for Mentos (below in red) on the graph from above you can see a brand benefitting by a whole new order of magnitude. Mentos does not have the awareness of Coke and these videos won't change that. I wonder though, if Mentos marketers are in the habit of taking regular ACP studies - if so I bet this phenomenon would be sufficiently significant to be measured.




I chatted with a guy who works on Mentos in Europe and it sounds as though they're ecstatic about the situation, having had nothing to do with creating it. The impact on sales has been significant as well.

Scrubs is Meme-tastic

Ever worried that one of your favourite comedies has been on television a bit too long? The same characters, telling the same jokes...

The TV show Scrubs has produced a voice-over homage to the Charlie Brown's Christmas - the animated special that has been played on TV in North America every Christmas for the last four decades or so.



Mildly amusing, easy to pass on, easy to broadcast, benefiting from celebrity and existing cultural references.

This is meme-tastic

Meme-tastic Project

I've decided to start keeping a little record of online marketing or content that is meme-tastic.

A meme is, roughly, a unit of knowledge. Memetics is the study of how memes are passed between people.

People, for instance, know they should plan ahead in part because of:

'a stitch in time saves nine'

'an ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure'

These are good ideas that have an elegant oral/cultural vehicle that passes them along. They're meme-tastic (I've made that up I think - out of laziness more than anything else).

My interest in this subject is partly due to the fact that it's a point of intersection of traditional and emerging advertising. Mark Ritson has done some really interesting work about how advertising effectiveness is drawn significantly from how people interact with messaging culturally - whether they ignore it or talk about it.

There's a belief around the office at the moment that the best medium for broadcasting advertising that makes people talk is television. While this may not be entirely true (there are an increasing number of internet-based memes that people have in common), it is still mostly true. The exception in advertising (as opposed to PR) is online viral advertising - a sub-industry that needs a lot of work.

Memetics is roughly related to viral advertsing. There are virals that are meme-tastic and there are virals that make everybody work a bit too hard. Bad virals sacrifice brand values in order to gain a foothold with an initial user and then over-incentivise people to spam their friends. A meme-tastic viral is worth sharing for its own sake and helps build a brand, attaching positive associations with the brand.

The aim of my 'project' is to put together a list of good and bad examples for future reference. These won't necessarily be viral campaigns. There are two kinds of 'meme-tastic' communication.

The first is where the idea/concept is brilliant or interesting - it fits perfectly with a social situation, a brand or a zeitgeist and people just want to pass it on. Take, for example, the way that everybody knows that Dell Laptop batteries have been blowing up, or how for six weeks this fall people have been saying 'Yagshemesh.'

The second kind of meme-tastic communication is for idea/concepts that are a little bit more banal but where the communication is facilitated by a cunning mass communicator or a piece of technology.

If you have any good examples I'd love to hear about them.