Day one of Blur, PMA’s 2010 Integrated Marketing Conference got underway today. I arrived in Chicago this morning a little behind schedule since my plane out of Rochester was delayed because the crew was late! They arrived with breakfast bags in hand and told us once we got settled on the plane that they had a late night.
I just became a new user of Foursquare and used the location-based tool to do my first official check-in at the Fairmont Hotel here in Chicago and got my first points. The only other “friend” that checked in at the Fairmont was David Berkowitz. He’s been using the tool much longer then I have and has been on a multi-city trip around the country the past couple of weeks. So when I caught up with him later I asked for a few tips on how this is supposed to work.
I missed the opening session which was a welcome from Bonnie Carlson, PMA’s president, and then the opening keynote from Univision Communications. I settled in to hear Marc Hanson from Pepsi’s Mt. Dew speaking about their integrated marketing campaign, DEWmocracy. They ran the first part of this campaign in the summer of 2008, tying into the presidential election year. They asked consumers to vote for their next Mt. Dew in which they gave them a choice of a red, white or blue flavor. Voltage, a red raspberry flavor, won with 43% of the votes and Mt. Dew rolled out the new product in 1st quarter ’09.
The ROI Mt. Dew saw was 36 million cases of product sold, 85% which was incremental. They achieved this through off-shelf placements in end caps, coolers and other locations at retail. They claim that the campaign was all about “bringing the voice of consumers and a unique product to store shelves”.
I’m skipping now to my favorite break-out session of the afternoon which was in the Digital track from the marketing team at Jet Blue, Morgan Johnston and Tara Ryan-Carson. They shared with us some of what they’ve learned over the past year as they’ve experimented with social media, mostly Twitter. They started off talking about how they dealt with a crisis situation when one of their jets sat on the tarmac at JFK for hours enraging customers and becoming a PR nightmare. They learned that they needed to listen to the customers' complaints and explain to them as best they could how they were going to fix it for the future.










