"Appeal to teens and drive up household penetration." When we visited Dibs (Dreyers Ice Cream) in Oakland, CA last fall that was the goal. The snacking teens was the target.
Teens are not the easiest group to go after. They need inspiration - and for adult marketers that usually takes some perspiration. How do we do that and inspire long-term brand conversation in the snacking category? Hmmmm. "What do teens desire most? What will get them to do almost anything???" (All of the sudden I had a wicked image appear in my head. Remember the scene from FAME? "Take off our shirt Coco")
How does Doing Dibs Instead, talk to teens? After a Flora Dora sitting at Five Ninth and a few notes on the back of a cocktail napkin the light bulb went off. Aha! The idea could only take flight with a partner who could help us reach teens on every imaginable medium.
I called my buddies at MTV's Generator and we jumped in to action together. Then and only then could we make people who Do Dibs Instead Famous. Thus the birth of the Dibs Film Festival.
The Dibs brand could facilitate teens fame by holding a "Do Dibs Instead" Film Festival. The festival could inspire earned media with a chance at something they desire most - it had to be something more than 15 MB of fame on YouTube. We would allow their proclamations of brand love to be the next Dibs spot on MTV.
A full month after the launch at the MTV Movie Awards, the banner ads were live, the TV spots began driving awareness and the consumer generated videos in widgets were a blazing across the internet. Teens seem to be doing exactly what we hoped the campaign would do which was inspire Do Dibs Instead videos, organic content has began popping up and kids are buying packs of Dibs to appear in their home videos. We have done exactly what we set out to do.
We have inspired young consumers to begin a digital conversation about doing / choosing our bite sized snacks attempting to driving volume at retail. I had to buy 14 packs of dibs for my kids to complete their production! (just do a search for Dibs Film Fest and see the content numbers grow) How many will you buy this summer to make your teen famous? Show us how you Do Dibs Instead at http://www.dibsfilmfest.com
Behind Dibs Film Fest - The Big Idea
While the idea was simple - this was not an easy production. As many of you know I gave birth to this idea at TracyLocke then in between gigs (my move to Wunderman) I spearheaded the digital, along with the writing stylings of Snack's Jennifer Leuzzi, which serves as the conversation hub that the broadcast and out of home creative continues to feed into.
There were many production and technical partners involved. Some of those partners were great... and others not so great. When I look back at the the temporal design specifications what I see is a Behind The Music style list of functionality created to engage the consumer. When I revisited it, the document tells an in depth story and shows which partners were miscast and which did not know how to follow Web 2.0 production standards.
Judge for yourselves and visit http://www.dibsfilmfest.com
