Jones Soda

Sometimes you just have to float an interesting idea out there and worry later about whether it’s good for the bottom line.

That’s the thinking behind a new Web site for Jones Soda, the alt-beverage company that has made its reputation on pure cane sugar, offbeat flavors like Blue Bubble Gum and Fufu Berry, and a staunch nonconformism.

Jones is the company that lets fans submit photos for its package labels. Now those same fans can add motion to their pictures and submit video clips to www.MyJonesVideo.com. The videos don’t have to have any explicit connection to Jones Soda—any more than the label photos of pets, friends and city fire escapes have to push the products.

“Jones as a brand invites consumers to participate in a number of different creative ways,” says Mike Spear e-commerce manager at Jones. “We’re approaching our millionth consumer-generated label and thought it was time to mark that by jumping on the online video situation. We decided to provide a location for our consumers do get involved in that, and we hope they do so.”

Spear says the rise of video has made the new site a natural evolution of Jones’ creative appeal—in fact, almost a mandatory one.

“Everybody has the capability to do video these days, either on camera phones or as digital video cameras get cheaper and move available,” he says. “There’s a lot of great video out there. We’re encouraging people to send us not only stuff that’s Jones-centric but what they’re doing in their lives and anything they think is cool.”

The company already lets customers order cases of their favorite Jones flavors with customized labels they design themselves to celebrate their special events, under an online program called www.MyJones.com. Spear sees the new video feature as a related form of branding. “We like to provide people with interesting experiences, whether that’s our retail labels or our custom cases. This is another one of those experiences we wanted to offer—showing your video to others.”

To unearth those experiences, Jones has cultivated associations with creative individualists in many different fields. The beverage maker already runs a Web site dedicated to profiling and featuring content from independent musicians, www. MyJonesMusic.com. It has also sponsored Team Jones, a stable of extreme-sports athletes in events such as surfing, snowboarding and BMX biking. Team Jones also includes a junior varsity subset of athletes in sports like skateboarding, MX motocross and biking; the “emerging athletes” group includes Seattle women’s roller derby league the Rat City Rollergirls and 5-year-old skateboarding phenom Seth Anderson.

Despite the company motto (“Run with the little guy… Create some change”), Jones also hooks into some big names. The company is a sponsor of this year’s Tony Hawk Boom Boom HuckJam skateboarding tour, bringing out a limited edition four-pack of the soda and offering Tony Hawk HuckJam branded skateboards as some of the prizes in the Jones “Under the Cap” text-to-win contest that will run through the rest of the year.

But back to the MyJonesVideo site. Live earlier this month, it’s powered by a user-generated publishing platform from Magnify.net. Users can upload their own clips, rate those already on the site, add comments and share them with others. They can also register at the site and create their own playlists of favorite videos, tap into the themed playlists created by site editors, or simply watch the lists of clips most recently added, most discussed, or most viewed for the week.

Magnify.net also supplies a widget-making tool that will let users add a thumbnail gallery of their favorite MyJonesSoda videos to a blog site. Videos are moderated by Jones; nothing gets posted immediately to the site without getting an editor’s okay.

What would earn a thumbs-down is rather hard to imagine, because Jones isn’t shy about putting its brand in some compromising positions. One of the video clips seeded on the new site is a 2006 segment from “Live with Regis and Kelly” that shows the TV hosts sampling Jones’ traditional “holiday pack” of drink flavors: Turkey and Gravy soda, along with Mashed Potato, Brussel Sprout and Green Bean Casserole. In the clip, Philbin manages to down the Mashed Potato soda without incident and even moves on to the Turkey. But after one swallow, Kelly Ripa turns pale and quite evidently comes closer to vomiting on national TV than anyone since George H.W. Bush’s last Japanese state dinner.

“That publicity was huge for us,” Spear laughs. “My favorite part is when Regis shakes the bottle of Turkey and Gravy to mix it up.”

“When I meet people on the street and they find out that I work for Jones, that’s the first question they ask,” he adds. “‘What the heck’s up with the Turkey and Gravy soda?’” In fact, a large number of Jones-related videos on YouTube focus on contests to see who can keep down a full tasting of its holiday pack. (Trust me: don’t go looking for these, if you ever hope to enjoy Thanksgiving again.)

One recurring question with user-content Web campaigns is whether to drive users to a specific site or to locate them where the Web traffic is already passing by—either on the main brand site or on a high-volume aggregator, such as a channel on YouTube, MySpace or Facebook. Spear says the company opted for the separate Web site in order to get more visual opportunities for branding and a less generic feel than it would have achieved within YouTube or on a MySpace channel.

Steve Rosenbaum, CEO of video platform provider Magnify.net, agrees that creating a separate site for video content gives Jones Soda some branding advantages that may outweigh the concerns of low traffic.

Rosenbaum makes a distinction between companies that use consumer-generated content as just part of a one-off promotion and those that see it as a building block for customer communities and, ultimately, brand advocacy.

“One of the things smart brands figure out early on is that if they can change their best customers into advocates, everything changes in the business,” he says.” Problems get identified sooner; customers get heard more readily; the passion about the things you’re doing right gets amplified in the consumer base.

“What Jones has done is to figure out that their unique selling proposition is that their customers are fundamentally creative, and to give them places to express those feelings, on the label and now online.”

Spear says that while the company plans to promote the new video site with some contests later in the year, it will basically let the site run and see what kind of reception it gets from Jones’ fan base.

“We want to take a grass-roots organic approach to the whole thing,” he says. “I don’t see us throwing tons of money at it. But it will be neat to see how it grows just from our consumers jumping on and adding their stuff.”