Mentoshelpline.com claims to know the answers to all of life’s greatest problems. If you can’t figure out how to ask your boss for a holiday, the Mentoshelpline executive will advise you to shoot him (the boss, that is). Whether you are the homicidal kind or not, the ‘Apply to be a mentoshelpline executive’ button might look tempting; press on it though, and they’ll tell you to wait until you receive a rejection letter from the company.
If you then start wondering whether the website is serious, you need, as per the expert advice offered by the helpine, a Mentos.
The (infamous and rather hilarious) helpline is the latest web campaign for Mentos, and Sameer Suneja, head of marketing at Perfetti van Melle (PVM), India, hopes it’ll soon turn into a viral advertisement, with people emailing sections of the site to their friends. Most candy producers are traditional players, advertising on television and through radio. After some accidental and other, more deliberate successes on the web, PVM is betting on a medium and strategy that is previously uncharted by candy makers in India.
According to Suneja, there are some 37 million people in the 16-35 age band, who live in urban areas and are online. These are the people the website aims to target. The idea behind the site is to reach out to these people through a medium they recognise, with the same slogan ‘Mentos: dimaag ki batti jalaa de’ that they recognise, but in a manner and with an offering that will come as a complete surprise, and, as the company hopes, will be amusing enough to be ‘viralled’.
Mentoshelpline.com is a spoof on call centres, because the creators felt that everyone is uniformly sick of having to deal with call centres, including call centre executives themselves. The site features videos of helpline executives who, perhaps, have a more effective answer than the kind we’ve been accustomed to, for all the usual stumbles that strike the casual net browser. There isn’t an iota of seriousness in this web campaign that’s being run to promote Mentos candies, by the world’s third largest candy producer.
In India, PVM is the single biggest producer of candy, catering to some 30 per cent of the market, says Suneja. The rest of the market is largely fragmented between Wrigleys, Cadbury, Parle and others. 30 million pieces of PVM candy are consumed in the country every single day, making the company about twice as large as its closest competitor, he adds.
Candy is often used instead of small change. People don’t usually care which mint, as long as it’s mint. And other than the odd Poppins, that have become favourites forever, there were previously no strong brands. PVM has, however, created well-known names like Chlor-mint and Alpenliebe that a lot of people remember and ask for, whenever they want either mint or caramel toffee.
Both Chlor-mint and Mentos have a significantly different image from one another and from any other candy in the market. Mentos is available in three fruity flavours other than mint, and does not really compete with Chlor-mint. While Chlor-mint is meant to be functional, as a breath freshner, Mentos is more about youth and fun, and has little or no functionality.
As was mentioned earlier, PVM has had some real success online, across the globe. One campaign was created quite by accident by two people who were fooling around with Mentos and Diet Coke in America. When Mentos is dropped into a bottle of Diet Coke, it creates a volcano of Coke. The two men recorded this happening and put the video on their website. Within days, the videos were a rage. People were replicating the experiment and creating their own Mentos + Diet Coke videos; magazines and newspapers carried the scientific explanation for why this happens and while the Coca-Cola company was apprehensive during the initial days, PVM was all there, enjoying every bit of the glory, encouraging and promoting the viral. “It was the third most popular download in one month in India” said Suneja when I asked him about the viral. And I must have looked a little skeptical, to which he replied “these are Google figures, not mine.”
Another web campaign for PVM owned Center Fresh Air was created by Ogilvy & Mather (O&M) last year. They had a model wearing a red dress, similar to the one worn by Marilyn Monroe in the famous picture, with her skirt flying with the wind. The girl would appear on the computer screen and every time you’d blow into the computer’s mic, her skirt would fly, and the harder you blew, the higher it would fly! Not surprisingly, so many people, sitting in their office cubicles, bored, liked the idea so much that the website server crashed thrice in three days. They then took the campaign on ground, in pubs, where they installed LCD screens and had a mic. People were encouraged to eat a Center Fresh Air before blowing, and they blew, almost every one who came by it, did.
Mentoshelpline.com, also created by O&M, and a tremendously excited Suneja, is about a week old yet, and had attracted about 25,000 page views when this story went for print. “A lot of it is chance,” says Suneja. A wrong move can irritate people or just die out. “It’s practically impossible to tell what will work on the net and what will not. But, when something does work, people just click, click, click…and suddenly, everyone’s talking about it.”
If you then start wondering whether the website is serious, you need, as per the expert advice offered by the helpine, a Mentos.
The (infamous and rather hilarious) helpline is the latest web campaign for Mentos, and Sameer Suneja, head of marketing at Perfetti van Melle (PVM), India, hopes it’ll soon turn into a viral advertisement, with people emailing sections of the site to their friends. Most candy producers are traditional players, advertising on television and through radio. After some accidental and other, more deliberate successes on the web, PVM is betting on a medium and strategy that is previously uncharted by candy makers in India.
According to Suneja, there are some 37 million people in the 16-35 age band, who live in urban areas and are online. These are the people the website aims to target. The idea behind the site is to reach out to these people through a medium they recognise, with the same slogan ‘Mentos: dimaag ki batti jalaa de’ that they recognise, but in a manner and with an offering that will come as a complete surprise, and, as the company hopes, will be amusing enough to be ‘viralled’.
Mentoshelpline.com is a spoof on call centres, because the creators felt that everyone is uniformly sick of having to deal with call centres, including call centre executives themselves. The site features videos of helpline executives who, perhaps, have a more effective answer than the kind we’ve been accustomed to, for all the usual stumbles that strike the casual net browser. There isn’t an iota of seriousness in this web campaign that’s being run to promote Mentos candies, by the world’s third largest candy producer.
In India, PVM is the single biggest producer of candy, catering to some 30 per cent of the market, says Suneja. The rest of the market is largely fragmented between Wrigleys, Cadbury, Parle and others. 30 million pieces of PVM candy are consumed in the country every single day, making the company about twice as large as its closest competitor, he adds.
Candy is often used instead of small change. People don’t usually care which mint, as long as it’s mint. And other than the odd Poppins, that have become favourites forever, there were previously no strong brands. PVM has, however, created well-known names like Chlor-mint and Alpenliebe that a lot of people remember and ask for, whenever they want either mint or caramel toffee.
Both Chlor-mint and Mentos have a significantly different image from one another and from any other candy in the market. Mentos is available in three fruity flavours other than mint, and does not really compete with Chlor-mint. While Chlor-mint is meant to be functional, as a breath freshner, Mentos is more about youth and fun, and has little or no functionality.
As was mentioned earlier, PVM has had some real success online, across the globe. One campaign was created quite by accident by two people who were fooling around with Mentos and Diet Coke in America. When Mentos is dropped into a bottle of Diet Coke, it creates a volcano of Coke. The two men recorded this happening and put the video on their website. Within days, the videos were a rage. People were replicating the experiment and creating their own Mentos + Diet Coke videos; magazines and newspapers carried the scientific explanation for why this happens and while the Coca-Cola company was apprehensive during the initial days, PVM was all there, enjoying every bit of the glory, encouraging and promoting the viral. “It was the third most popular download in one month in India” said Suneja when I asked him about the viral. And I must have looked a little skeptical, to which he replied “these are Google figures, not mine.”
Another web campaign for PVM owned Center Fresh Air was created by Ogilvy & Mather (O&M) last year. They had a model wearing a red dress, similar to the one worn by Marilyn Monroe in the famous picture, with her skirt flying with the wind. The girl would appear on the computer screen and every time you’d blow into the computer’s mic, her skirt would fly, and the harder you blew, the higher it would fly! Not surprisingly, so many people, sitting in their office cubicles, bored, liked the idea so much that the website server crashed thrice in three days. They then took the campaign on ground, in pubs, where they installed LCD screens and had a mic. People were encouraged to eat a Center Fresh Air before blowing, and they blew, almost every one who came by it, did.
Mentoshelpline.com, also created by O&M, and a tremendously excited Suneja, is about a week old yet, and had attracted about 25,000 page views when this story went for print. “A lot of it is chance,” says Suneja. A wrong move can irritate people or just die out. “It’s practically impossible to tell what will work on the net and what will not. But, when something does work, people just click, click, click…and suddenly, everyone’s talking about it.”
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