Lacta - a Grecian chocolate company bought by Kraft Foods in the 1980s, and currently the top-selling chocolate brand in Greece - has made good use of interactive marketing in the past few years to promote love (and, by extension, chocolate). Lacta's most recent project climaxed on Valentine's Day 2010 with the premiere of a love story, brought to film by Lacta customers.
Creation of the 27-minute film, entitled "Love in Action," began in October 2009 with a television ad inviting viewers to submit their own real-life love stories on the Love in Action website, www.loveinaction.gr, for the chance to have their story made into a movie. According to an article this week by AdAge.com, the site received 1,307 submitted love stories.
Lacta, their marketing consultants at OgilvyOne Worldwide, and screenwriter George Kapoutzidis picked the winning story from the 1,307 entries.
In November 2009, Lacta issued another tv spot, asking the audience to view actors' screentests for the film (which were posted in full online), and to vote for the cast of the love story. These online audience members also chose the characters' names and clothing for the film.
In early February 2010, Lacta released a short trailer for "the love story we all turned into a movie."
Originally scheduled to release solely online on February 14, the "Love in Action" film also broadcast - at no cost to Lacta - as part of the Valentine's Day programming on Greece's leading tv station, MEGA Channel.
In March 2010, Lacta published a fourth and final tv commercial for the campaign, showing the film's ending and announcing that the film was based on a true love story.
(See the film and the entire campaign process at the Love in Action blog.)
And it seems that interactive romance stories work well for Greece's leading chocolate brand. In the quarter after the Love in Action campaign began, Lacta's sales were up 0.6% while the overall chocolate market was down.
This was not Lacta's first foray into interactive storytelling, either. In 2008, OgilvyOne had helped Lacta to release an online "choose-your-own-ending" love story, entitled "Love at First Site". Visitors made choices to move the story along to a happy (or unhappy) ending. Codes on wrappers of Lacta chocolate bars provided clues as to the right choices to make on the site.
Due to the success of the crowdsourced romance - according to AdAge, "Love in Action" was viewed by 12% of Greek television watchers, and was viewed 150,000 times during its first few weeks online - Lacta plans to create another interactive online love story based on one of the other 1,306 campaign entries.
Love, chocolate, and audience participation. Seems to be a winning combo for Lacta.
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