PRETZ DAY

TitlePRETZ DAY
BrandEZAKI GLICO
Product / ServicePRETZ
CategoryC07. Co-Creation & User Generated Content
EntrantDOF Tokyo, JAPAN
Idea Creation DOF Tokyo, JAPAN
Idea Creation 2 DENTSU INC. Tokyo, JAPAN
Media Placement DOF Tokyo, JAPAN
Media Placement 2 DENTSU INC. Tokyo, JAPAN

Credits

Name Company Position
Taro Saito dof inc. Creative Director
Ryuichiro Akamatsu dentsu inc. Creative Director
Yukio Hashiguchi dentsu inc. Copywriter
Kazuhide Adachi dentsu inc. Copywriter
Chihiro Kato dentsu inc. Copywriter
Tomonori Saito dentsu inc. Art Director
Takayuki Kawana dof inc. Communication Desginer
Akiyo Ogawa dentsu inc. Producer
Kazuhide Takada dentsu inc. Account Exective
Satoshi Kuno Spare Pocket Producer
Yuichi Nakatsu Freelance Photographer

The Campaign

The idea is to hijack POCKY DAY and change it to PRETZ DAY. PRETZ looks exactly like POCKY. PRETZ’s package looks like POCKY as well. PRETZ was born in 1960, it’s 3 years older than POCKY. The only difference is that PRETZ doesn’t have chocolate on it. If PRETZ can speak, it would definitely say “It’s not fair! November 11th should be PRETZ day and everyone should talk about me!” We decide to let PRETZ’s voice heard.

Execution

On November 11th 2016, we’ve opened PRETZ’s twitter account(That’s right, PRETZ even didn’t have a twitter account until then) and shared a newspaper ad on the same morning. It says: Forever Alone. November 11th is not a POCKY day. It’s POCKY day and PRETZ day. PRETZ kept posting tweets such as: “Hey POCKY, you look great today.” “Sometimes you have to fight for your right, even if you know you can’t win.” “You don’t have to empathize me, just follow me.” At the same time we’ve launched the special website to express PRETZ feelings.?It contains more than 6,000 words, the longest website for a single product.

Newspaper ad: 70,000 retweets and 70,000 favs. It became the most popular Website: 221,849PV Media coverage: ¥36,347,500? Many POCKY fans betrayed POCKY and became PRETZ fans. There’re lots of user-generated PRETZ contents such as PRETZ MANGA, PRETZ art etc. Even POCKY ad’s celebrity posted a selfie with PRETZ in their hands. And most of all, PRETZ sales went up by 120%!

The Situation

Making an anniversary day is a common PR strategy in Japan. For example, January 19th is Karaoke day, February 6th is Matcha day, August 25th is Ramen day, December 3rd is Taxi day and so on. Among all, POCKY day is one of the most popular anniversary. POCKY, a Japanese stick snack, recognizes November 11th as “POCKY day” since 1111 looks like sticks. POCKY creates a huge organic buzz every year. You can find lots of POCKY selfies, tweets etc. on social media. Since PRETZ is also a stick snack which looks exactly like POCKY, we decide to mak

The Strategy

Our target audience is POCKY fans. They share selfies with POCKY on November 11th every year, however, they don’t give a damn about PRETZ. We want POCKY fans to understand how it feels to be a wallflower. So we choose to run a newspaper ad, the most wallflower ad nowadays. We knew that this strategy would work because 99% people on social media are wallflowers just like POCKY. They share lots of selfies to be social media superstars and end up nothing. They’ll understand and empathize with PRETZ.

Links

Website URL