Last month, General Mills-owned Chex Mix began advertising on Yahoo’s Fantasy Football mobile site, m.yahoo.com/fantasy. The campaign, by agency partner MRM Worldwide, presents users that click on a banner ad the ability to send “smack talk” to their friends with voiceovers from former pro football stars, such as Barry Sanders, Desmond Howard and Elbert “Ickey” Woods. It is part of an online integrated campaign with Yahoo’s Fantasy Football Web site.
Users can choose from several different messages to send in the form of a phone call. For example, one recording says, “Yo. This is Billy ‘White Shoes’ Johnson and your friend was just telling me about your fantasy football team. I’ll swing by to do the Heimlich, because your team just choked.”
The recipient is then sent to Chex Mix’s microsite, celebrationlegends.com, where they can send their own smack talk in the form of another call or a video-embedded e-mail. Users can also register on the site to win a 32-inch HDTV every week.
“Right now Chex Mix is in households, but it’s being eaten primarily by moms and kids,” said Steve Finnie, marketing manager of salty snacks for General Mills. “We know it’s in the house, so when dads go to grab food we want to remind him that Chex Mix is a great tasting snack that’s great to eat during the game.”
Finnie said that, through the first six weeks of the campaign, the mobile site had more than 58,000 visits and several thousand smack talks sent through the mobile site alone.
The campaign will run through December.
