In late 2004, the National Pork Board began their first major rebranding effort in 17 years. Accompanying the well-known phrase "The Other White Meat" was a new tagline — "Don't be blah." By convincing our target of women, 25-49, that the simple addition of The Other White Meat to the menu rotation could take the dinner hour from boring to exciting, the brand would shift to top-of-mind over other entrée considerations come meal preparation time. A secondary objective was to drive traffic to otherwhitemeat.com for recipes and nutritional information. Meeting these busy moms where they were would be paramount for success.
Expanding on the innovation of the campaign's first year, we continued bringing the "Don't be blah" message to life using new emerging media platforms like online gaming (our target spends hours playing these games with multiple brand touch-points), and the WeatherBug desktop application (great potential for integration into a consumer's daily routine). We also promoted pork as a meal alternative within different placements (rich media units with video technology and musical recipes), via custom recipe content areas (to extend reach/exposure on different sites) and through search engine marketing (searches for chicken, beef or fish in search engines and food sites would suggest pork, too).
During the three-month campaign, search/media efforts delivered 179,000+ visitors to otherwhitemeat.com. The MSN Bejeweled Game reached over a million page views and more than 550,000 unique users. Sponsorship of WeatherBug's daily forecast was integrated with recipes and produced CTR more than five times the industry average. Top-performing placements on Allrecipes produced over 100% CTR as consumers clicked multiple recipe options within one exposure. TV Guide produced a custom microsite and podcast that creatively paired recipes with TV programming, producing a 70%+ CTR. Ultimately, the podcast delivered more than 64,000 downloads excluding the exposure from iTunes.