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The life-size cardboard cut-out of Edward stopped me in my tracks as I walked the aisles at Toy Fair in New York this week.  ‘Twilight’ was one of the newer licenses dotting booths at the annual toy industry show.  Mattel has cast the Twilight stars - Edward and Bella - as Barbie dolls.  Mattel also unveiled the newest Barbie career dolls: News Anchor Barbie and Computer Engineer Barbie, as voted by fans and getting good buzz at the show.

Anniversaries were another dominant theme at Toy Fair: Etch a Sketch and Slinky celebrate their 50th and 65th (wow, I’m old!); Hello Kitty is 35; and Hasbro introduced a round Monopoly game board in honor of Monopoly’s 75th.   The makers of Rubik’s Cube (a 360 client), which turns 30 in 2010, have rolled out a campaign to empower America’s youth to solve the cube - check out the Rubik’s Facebook page we just set up for the You Can Do the Cube campaign.  You CAN do it!

Our friends at the Toy Book were offering to tweet show news for exhibitors.  Simply stop by Toy Book’s booth at the Javits with your 140 characters and the editors will tweet it out.  Social media made even easier.  You can read all the tweets from the show at #toyfair.

Looking at the appointment schedules our teams booked up for clients, it was striking just how many more bloggers made it to the show this year.  That added some welcomed immediacy and a real-parent perspective to the Toy Fair news stream.  (Love to read your post if you want to leave a link here.)

And here’s one of my favorite Toy Fair images - one that caught the attention of FOX Busiiness - the New York City skyline sculpted out of Bendaroos (a 360 client):

Filed under: Consumer Marketing, Events and Conferences, Industry Organizations, PR Industry, Retail by LauraTomasetti - 4 Comments →

Still aglow from pumpkin carving, indulging our inner monster and overindulging on mini-sized candy bars, the 360 Digital Team took a look at how brands competed for our affection by getting into the Halloween spirit. Just as costume couture has great range, so did these promotions: some were cute, some clever, some cool and hip, and of course some downright scary. In no particular, our four faves and the lessons we learned.

Taco Bell

Taco Bell is a brand that is not afraid to try new tricks. To scare up customer interest on Halloween (which nicely fell on the same day as the World Series), they treated fans across America to free Black Jack Tacos after 6 PM. To promote the giveaway, they ran 15-second spots on TV and promoted the giveaway on Facebook as “It’s not our trick. It’s our treat” (as an aside, they have 652,000 fans). Taco Bell fans got into the spirit of things, even posting photos of themselves dressed as hot sauce packets and tacos. The company hasn’t yet reported the sales that were driven by this brand stunt, but seeing how their Liberty Bell stunt (they announced that Taco Bell had purchased the Liberty Bell) lifted revenue by $600,000 in one day, I’m sure it was a good holiday for the chain. By the way, does anyone share my interest in knowing what ingredients make the taco shells this dark shade of black?

Category: Edgy
Lesson Learned: It pays to be generous and to not take yourself too seriously.
Link: http://www.facebook.com/tacobell?v=app_2344061033

Foo Fighters

The Foo Fighters jumped right into the Halloween Festivities and performed a free, live concert on Facebook on October 30 from their Studio 606 complex in California. They used the same Livestream technology that was used for CNN’s live stream of Barack Obama’s inauguration. Earlier this month, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl and his group “Them Crooked Vultures” released their new single on Facebook.  The facebook concert was a great treat for fans and good trick by the Foo Fighters. What was especially neat was seeing fans of the band connecting from across the world. While performing, band members were paying attention to the stream of status updates, responding to comments, and even taking song requests from fans! I couldn’t help but notice that their fan base on facebook increased considerably over the last week. They also had 17,000 confirmed guests and 1,700 wall posts. Talk about engaging with your fans! Coincidence that they are releasing their greatest hits compilation later this month? I think not.

Category: Cool
Lesson: There is an undeniable trend of live events moving online. You can reach a significant online audience and the costs are low. There is something to be said for thinking big online.
Link: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=317195110480

Target

A brand with nearly 600,000 fans on Facebook and such panache for design found a clever way to use Halloween to create consumer engagement AND drive sales. They created a dedicated “Halloween” tab on their facebook page.  Click on it and you land on Target’s Halloween Horroscope page, featuring the cute skeleton animals from “skelanimals,” which just happens to be a cutting edge line of junior apparel sold only at Target under the tag line  ”Dead animals need love too.” Answer three quick questions and either the dead dog, cat, bat or spider spits out your horrorscope.  Seems my sign was “Scaries” and like “Dax” the dead dog, I am dying to keep the party alive. I was prompted to click on “my costume in the stars,” and up popped an awesome “Go Go Dress” costume, which I could instantly buy for $38.99 or I could browse the other 5000 costumes for purchase.

Category: Sassy
Lesson: Creativity works, and you CAN engage customers and drive brand sales in one fell swoop online.
Link: http://www.facebook.com/target#/target?v=app_149255152302

Halloween Horror Nights at Universal

If you really like to marinate in Halloween, then you probably know that rival theme parks Busch Gardens and Universal make recreation out of seeing who can send the biggest chill up the spines of their guests.  This year, in addition to the haunted houses, the entertainment team at Universal stole the honors with the idea of taking Horror previously only seen on the silver screen and bringing it to life - we’re talking really really scary flicks like Wolfman, Saw, Chucky and Fangoria. The event created major buzz with a super scary website (you hear the hum of a chainsaw in the background the whole time), and an app called “mobile terror” that gave fans updates (aka built buzz) prior to arrival, and offered trivia and wait times for haunted houses while at the event! (aka good customer service) If you couldn’t get to the event, you could enjoy one of the nine terrifying videos on the Hallowen Horror Nights facebook. For the first time ever, Universal also offered their Twitter followers “behind the scenes” access with their top Creative Director revealing exclusive information and tweeting a running creative chronicle of the celebrated event’s design, casting and production.

Category: Terrifyingly good
Lesson: Buzzworthy events with huge fan bases are an ideal fit for social media. And, if you’re going to look for inspiration for a marketing idea, why not borrow from popular culture.
Link: http://www.halloweenhorrornights.com/orlando/

Filed under: Retail, Social Media by CindyGordon - 6 Comments →

Last week, I traveled down to New York for the Gift Guide Show Media Event put on by Propel Media Events.  Editors from some of the top national consumer outlets were out in full-force with eager eyes looking to identify the “latest and greatest” gift ideas for the upcoming holiday season.

While “value” was the name of the game for most media in attendance, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that higher price tags did not necessarily turn-off the media.  This left me wondering - is the recession coming to an end?

Just one year ago it seemed like a gift suggestion of more than $100 was practically a lost cause. But now, perhaps, consumers are ready to push through all of the doom and gloom that the recession has reaped.  In fact, consumer confidence appears to be on the rise - USA Today recently reported that consumer confidence in the month of May is the highest it has been since September 2008!

While we are definitely not out of the recession completely, the good news is that our moods are lifting and consumer goods companies have a positive outlook towards a boost in holiday sales in 2009 - and we as publicists can help keep the positivity coming.

Filed under: Events and Conferences, PR Industry, Retail by JohnLeRoy - 1 Comment →