With a winning product, Kraft took a calculated risk on a viral campaign that delivered huge results. Find out how.

Spreading information about a new product through word of mouth isn't as easy as it sounds. In fact, as any seasoned marketer knows, a lot of thought needs to go into a WOM campaign. But when it works, the results can be quite powerful, according to Adam Butler, senior associate brand manager at Kraft.

iMedia: Can you give us the story of how the marketing team arrived at the decision to do a digital word-of-mouth campaign for Kraft’s Philadelphia cream cheese?

Adam Butler: It started with having a great new reduced fat product that people said was as rich and creamy as the full fat version. It's just not that common that taste tests show a reduced fat product doing as well as the full fat version, so we decided to focus on this as a campaign for 2008. The original idea to build awareness for the launch was called "Breakfast from Heaven," and the concept was to delight weary morning travelers on JetBlue flights with a surprise breakfast that included our new 1/3 Less Fat Philly.

The team had a ton of energy around the idea but had a hard time initially getting everybody excited beyond a press release. The JetBlue plan was fantastic, but we felt like we needed something more. Big companies tell people all the time that their lower fat products taste good, but the truth is that most people don't believe it because they've been burned so many times by poor tasting reduced fat products. Word of mouth seemed like the right play because we thought, "Who are you going to believe more about something like this, the big company or one of your friends/peers?"

The launch was quickly approaching, led by our manager Ericka Gettman. We came up with the idea (mid-December) to film Tyler and me getting passenger reactions to the breakfast. Originally, we were going to upload the video to our LoveMyPhilly.com blog, but we decided it would be best to create a separate blog with a bit of a "back story." Essentially it was "Adam and Tyler have been charged with making this launch huge, and they only have two weeks to come up with the idea."

The reality is this was completely true, which we found to be very important when entering the blogosphere. So, in addition to our normal responsibilities, Tyler and I basically spent the next couple of weeks writing articles, filming videos and working with our digital partners DEI to come up with the best word-of-mouth program we could think of.

iMedia: Kraft is a mature brand with a long history of traditional advertising. Was there any uncertainty within the company about this campaign? If so, how did you and Tyler overcome it?

Adam Butler: Certainly there was some initial hesitancy to the idea, if for no other reason because Kraft as a company hadn't done a lot of things like this before. In some ways, this is a very difficult space for big companies to play in because most big companies want to keep tight control over everything they put out there. Don't get me wrong, many times this is for good reason -- a reputation built on hundreds of years is a big thing to potentially put at risk. That being said, you simply can't have as much control if you're going to get involved in social media. I think we overcame it because we:

1. Had buy-in from our manager. Ericka had great vision and acceptance in understanding how powerful digital media and the internet could be, and empowered us to go out there and see what we could do.
   
   
2. Built a plan that we released in little bits to senior management. We walked our senior management through parts of our plan at a time, releasing a little more of the detail as we went. I think if we had dropped the entirety of our plan up front it would have been shot down. It was just too different from protocol.
   
   
3. Rolled the dice. At the end of the day, we had to make the decision to go forward or not without a lot of data, money, precedent or approval. To some degree it was the team saying, "We believe in this, and we're doing it."

However, I do have to give credit to Kraft. Once we got a little momentum going, they were fully supportive and really very open to trying to be progressive in this space.

iMedia: You and Tyler lent your faces to the campaign. Given the one-to-one nature of the web, is a personal touch an important element of a successful digital campaign?

Adam Butler: I think it depends on the tone and formality of the campaign. There are a ton of things that can work on the web that are not personal. The web is a cool medium that facilitates immediate information transfer in new and interesting ways. You can have a web campaign that utilizes the immediate timing and visual flexibility that the web has, to a fantastic campaign that is not based on personal touch. For example, we have a cheesecake customizer widget on Creamcheese.com that is totally impersonal, but people love it.

That being said, I think one of the biggest benefits of the web that we can utilize is that it allows for immediate multi-personality interaction and feedback via chatrooms, blogs, forums, etc., which other more traditional mediums can't replicate. An additional capability that the web can bring to the table is the ability to bring to life a message or campaign with a different tone or formality level. In these cases, I do think personal touch is important because you've moved from "Big Company is talking at me," to "Someone or something talking with me."

For AdamandTyler.com, we were trying to communicate with people in a very different way online from what our other media vehicles were doing. We were trying to build word-of-mouth awareness of something that people had typically been very skeptical of, and personalizing the brand was the only way we thought we could authentically and credibly have that conversation.

iMedia: One of the big issues in digital has been getting the right metrics to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. How did your team set about defining and measuring the benchmarks for success?

Adam Butler: We had a lot of the same struggles at first. What's the ROI? What's the volume impact? What's the specific reach and frequency against our target market? These are really difficult questions to answer in this space, but to be honest, we needed to be able to provide some quantitative evidence that this was making an impact, otherwise it will continue to be overlooked as a viable tactic when the dollars are being handed out. We tried to evaluate this program a couple of ways:

1. Total campaign as a PR vehicle. We tracked the total dollars spent against the PR campaign and the resulting impressions generated, which led to a PR dollar efficiency. We included everything to run the PR for this (partnership with JetBlue, product cost, etc.), and when compared to the dollars spent, it was one of most efficient PR events we've seen.
   
   
2. Internet brand noise. We engaged Buzz Metrics to track the level of "noise" or conversations generated on the web by different elements of the campaign, and the campaign in general. The good news is that the campaign generated as much noise as we typically see during our peak sales time, which is much higher than normal.
   
   
3. ROI of the word-of-mouth campaign. The AdamandTyler.com word-of-mouth portion of the campaign didn't really cost all that much (website construction fees, travel for two people for a week, word-of-mouth conversations, etc.), and a lot of our success came from this component. So given that it didn't cost that much, we can use some pretty basic models to assess that the ROI worked out.
   
   
4. National attention. At the end of the day, we received big time national coverage from television (Fox Business News), radio (NPR), and print (Brandweek), which were additional indicators that something was going right.

iMedia: What did you learn about digital from this experience that you will take forward to the next campaign?

Adam Butler: An incredible amount, but here's the top 10:

1. Be authentic.
2. Accept some risk; you will not be able to control everything.
3. If you're not talking about your product online, others are, and they're controlling the conversation.
4. We need to be where people are getting their information and talking about food. People are on the web doing this everyday.
5. Don't underestimate how technologically savvy your SVC is, you can reach her/him through ways you've never thought of.
6. You need to find a way to respond to people's comments; this is not a one-way conversation.
7. People want to feel like they're being heard; this forum is a particularly easy way to achieve this feeling.
8. Your brand is newsworthy, and there are people out there interested in talking about it (regardless of the brand). Don't underestimate the business team's impact on people and how much they like to talk with you.
9. Videos. People love being on camera for anything (consider the success of YouTube).
10. If it's been done before, don't do it again, do it better.

Michael Estrin is deputy editor at iMediaConnection.