Tide

The temptation is probably hard to resist. You’ve developed your creative idea for the Super Bowl. You’ve storyboarded the spot and seen the idea through to execution. You’ve signed that big fat $2.7 million check for thirty seconds’ worth of the national attention span. Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy the limelight. It’s Miller time… or rather, this being the Super Bowl, Budweiser time.

But Tide wanted its first-ever Super Bowl commercial, for the Tide to Go instant stain-remover pen, to do more than simply provide a first-quarter laugh. So the Procter & Gamble brand used the ad, from agency Saatchi + Saatchi, as a springboard for a much fuller and more engaging online campaign.

“We launched the Tide to Go pen back in 2005 based on the demographic of the busy mom,” says Kash Shaikh, brand spokesman for Tide. “But letters, e-mail and consumer calls from people outside that group have told us how the product had saved them in times of need. So we realized we had a much broader consumer base for this particular product than for any other in our portfolio, and it made a lot of sense for use to showcase it on this huge Super Bowl stage”—only the third time a brand from parent Procter & Gamble had appeared during the game in fact.

There was another clear reason to show up during the broadcast. “The Super Bowl is the ultimate stain-making occasion, with almost 100 million people watching this year and thousands of Super Bowl parties,” Shaikh says. “We thought we’d be catching a lot of people at the moment when they could understand the relevance of the product.”

Fair enough. But many of us who managed to keep the guac on the chip were also captivated by the commercial, in which a literally loud stain drowns out the responses of an embarrassed job interviewee. In fact, the USA Today Ad meter poll ranked the Tide to Go Talking Stain ad tenth among the game’s 63 spots, above both the E-Trade baby and Pepsi’s Justin Timberlake getting thrown a beating.

For us, Tide made it easy to navigate from the ad to the microsite and gave us reasons to stay once we did. The company got points from digital marketing observers such as Reprise Media for having the biggest, clearest and most unmistakable URL of any of the Bowl advertisers—www.MyTalkingStain.com, featured both in the end tag and in the TV voiceover– and for sending people not to a generic corporate site but to a microsite built expressly around the commercial. The company also made sure to do the requisite paid-search blocking and tackling around both its brand and the keyword terms right for the TV spot, Shaikh said, so that users who searched online for the commercial could find it with the click of a paid ad.

Tide was also careful to make the ad findable immediately on major video search sites. Last week, that effort won the company top honors in YouTube’s Super Bowl Ad Blitz, a survey of the best game ads as voted by more than 900,000 respondents on the video aggregator site. Both the spot and the campaign got positive recognition on media such as The Today Show, the CBS Early Show and ESPN.

Meanwhile, visitors who actually went to MyTalkingStain.com could find a number of ways to engage further with the Talking Stain campaign. For one thing, the ad kicked off a user-generated content (UGC) ad contest that will run until March 9, in which consumers can create their own 30-second commercial about some moment when stains were a problem or when stain removal saved the day. Entrants can download a “spoof toolkit” that includes logos, graphics and end tags. Contest rules specify a tagline, “Silence the stain instantly”, but don’t require that the Tide to Go pen be shown in action.

Users are also given a list of the stains the Tide to Go pen can remove and, just as importantly, warned against depicting the pen working on those stains it can’t (grease, blood or ink).

Entrants can upload their commercials at the Tide microsite. From there they make their way to a MyTalkingStain channel on YouTube, where viewers can rate them and of course e-mail them to their friends. After all the applications have been received, an expert panel chosen by Tide will select 10 finalists for posting on the Tide YouTube channel, and visitors can choose their favorite. That winner will be broadcast nationwide during prime time at some point later in the year.

Visitors to MyTalkingStain whose interest doesn’t stretch to making a whole video can also get in on the campaign with the “Be the Stain” instant win game. They can upload a photo of themselves, set it within the actual stain commercial, and, if they wish, dial a toll-free number to record their own audio for the spot. The resulting personalized ad can be embedded in a Web page, mailed to friends or saved to a PC. The process also enters the visitor to win one of 1,000 daily giveaway prizes until March 3, including Tide T shirts, stain pens, product coupons and one branded “Tide-pod” music player a day.

The MyTalkingStain.com site also lets users download the TV stain itself as a buddy icon or its jabber (reputedly partly Swedish) as a mobile ringtone. “The talking stain ringtones have been one of the most popular features on the site by far,” Shaikh says.

“We knew that if we were driving people to this site we needed it to be a destination where they could be engaged, share with their friends and have some fun,” he continues. “This was going to need to be a step up from what we’d done on the Web in the past, to give people a lot of things to do and to talk about on the site.”

The numbers say that Tide did its job, at least in the days following the Super Bowl. By the Tuesday after the game, Shaikh says the ad on the YouTube channel had been viewed almost 400,000 times, and almost 40,000 visitors to the microsite had created personal versions of the TV spot. As of press time, the UGC ad contest had 23 entrants up on YouTube, with presumably more in the approval pipeline, and the channel had received 58,000 views.

Shaikh says the online follow-through served as the real justification for Tide’s maiden voyage into Super Bowl waters.

“For us, there wasn’t going to be a Super Bowl ad from Tide unless we could build a powerful campaign around it,” he says. “While the 30-second spot was the heart of the campaign, the online portion was where we felt the power was really going to come from.”