While Mentos is a well-established brand, it had been steadily losing share in the Canadian market. Customers are generally aware of the Mentos brand, but less-than-optimal in-store placement among many competing brands, combined with a lack of significant innovation in the past years had led to diminishing sales. Mentos' uniqueness (between candy and mint) gives it an edge, but its competitors in the breath-freshener category are considerable (Tic Tac, Ice Breaker, Excel, etc).
For a second year in a row, the brand partnered with entertainment franchise The Amazing Race Canada, which is in line with Mentos' fresh and playful personality.
Partnering with The Amazing Race Canada, whose media target is men and women (age 18 to 34), was the perfect way to reach the brand's target, men and women (age 18 to 25), and expose them to Mentos' brand attributes and new products.
Working with Cossette, the brand developed a campaign that would keep the target audience engaged both in-store and online. The strategic idea was to fully integrate the brand into the show, by creating exclusive content during and around the show.
Every show began with a 30-second "The Amazing Race Canada Refresh, brought to you by Mentos," which was a recap of the previous episodes. The brand also created a challenge dedicated to Mentos. Amazing Race contestants, while in Buenos Aires in Argentina, had to solve riddles on local celebrities with letter-marked Mentos gums.
Mentos also created an online game to let consumers experience, at least in part, the sensation of what it's like to be a participant on the show. The brand developed an innovative browser-based contest and sent consumers on a virtual global quest to find Mentos products.
The brand transformed Google Street View into a way to explore the world. Using Facebook Connect and the Google Maps API, the team transformed Google Maps into "The Amazing Journey Contest," a Mentos gum 360-degree experience within a personalized Google Street View environment.
Five international destinations were chosen for the "Amazing Contest" adventure: Paris, Japan, Australia's Great Barrier Reef, Buenos Aires and Vancouver, where approximately 20 Mentos gum packs were hidden. Once a gum was found in the immersive landscape, the participants had to answer a cultural or geographical question to collect it. Several gamification features like "fresh passes" and "easter eggs" were added to make the game even more challenging.
A participant could collect a maximum of three gums daily to win one of three "amazing journeys" (a trip anywhere in the World) as grand prizes ($25,000 total value).
While the Amazing Race partnership generated much of the site's initial traffic, the team decided to keep the contest running once the show's season came to an end. The brand supported the contest on TV as well as on Mentos mint rolls, the Mentos gum bottles as well as on Mentos NowMints packaging. The team leveraged the 3D gum bottle by turning it into a snipe that appeared on other CTV-aired shows popular with the target demographic, such as the The Big Bang Theory. The team also created a 10s TV spot that showed a high-rendered 3D version of the Mentos products orbiting the Earth.
Results from the campaign showed that 54% of viewers remembered the Mentos challenge, 93% of them appreciated it, 47% of those were aware of the sponsorship. Aided recall of Mentos as a sponsor was 31%. The online game experience saw 412,168 visits to the site, an average time per visit of 05 minutes 04 seconds, 141,794 unique participants, while 1,792 users completed the game at least once and 65% of visitors returned to the microsite. The brand also exceeded its goal with an amazing 31% increase in sales the month after the show finished airing for the Mentos gums, 23% for the Mentos NowMints and 8% for the Mentos rolls.
