If you have a craving for chocolate milk, it’s no coincidence.
It seems Nesquik – the drink that “you can’t drink slow if it’s Quik” – is spending super major, buku bucks to ramp up its interactive and multimedia advertising.
Nesquik’s adoption of interactive media isn’t new, however. The brand’s been shakin’ things up for quite some time as evidenced by this article first published on BrandRepublic.com more than six years ago. Six years! That might as well be a hundred in digital speak.
Then, of course, there’s this video of passersby dropped-jawed at a massive store-wrapped campaign in downtown Los Angeles. Take a look.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eocM7p2jOU&hl=en&fs=1]
According to the folks on the street, the ad does its job over and over again, several times a day. “I want some chocolate milk!” a few of them exclaim.
Cha-ching!
But perhaps the most revealing display of Nesquik’s command of the interactive language is its presence on ABC.com, where, while watching the most recent episode of “Lost,” I enjoyed (and I mean it!) the exciting ads Nesquik placed between segments.
The first (the screenshot above) was fairly straightforward. Just a regular commercial that you’d see on TV or anywhere else online. But even if you don’t watch the video, which is pretty hard to resist in itself, there’s no way you can ignore the bright, colorful and downright cheery platform on which the campaign was built. It screams happiness – and also invites the captive Internet TV-watching audience to come to its “happy place,” which just happens to be your cupboard or the convenience store right around the corner.
The next phase of this four-part campaign is a game. Not just any game, though – rather, a simple, nostalgic game of Connect Four. I got so caught up playing the game that I totally forgot that I only had to wait 30 seconds to rejoin my program. Somehow, I think that was the plan.
In part three of the series, there are a selection of videos available to watch while the 30-second timer runs down. Again, there are so many options that it’s hard not to spend at least two minutes browsing what seems to be user-generated content. Some of the videos are actually quite funny – if you’re into the chocolate milk as a cure-all kind of thing.
The fourth installment was actually the best of them all. (There’s no image because I accidentally closed the program before capturing it – and it took a half hour of opening and closing streaming videos just to find the Nesquik campaign for the purpose of this post.) It was another game, this time asking viewers to locate Nesquik Bunny on the screen. Once you clicked him, the campaign ended and – get this! – granted you early access back into the program. Brilliant!
How do I know it’s brilliant? Because I was so impressed by this campaign that I had to write about it.
My own giddiness aside, Nesquik seems to really have a handle on how to get viewers’ attention through interactive advertising. It’s much better than those boring auto adverts that I’m usually stuck watching during the online “commercial” break.
Nestle understands its audience, too. It’s not advertising where it doesn’t make sense. Unlike Volvo, Toyota, Nissan, and the other misguided companies misplacing ads on ABC.com.
If you don’t believe me, ask yourself a question: Which are you more likely to run out and buy after your episode is over – a $30,000 clunker or frothy, refreshing Nestle Nesquik?
The defense rests.
We only need four syllables to describe the technology demonstrated by Pattie Maes, associate professor in MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences, at last week’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference: IN-CRED-I-BLE!
It shouldn’t come as a shock that more and more marketers are taking their advertising efforts online. We’ve chronicled this shift fairly frequently, like in this post on the 
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