Mondelez and creative shop Droga5 are launching a Twitter campaign today for belVita breakfast biscuits called “Morning Win Swag Shop.” The goal is to gain a foothold in the quick-breakfast market—a space dominated by snack and cereal bars that are made by Kellogg’s and Quaker Oats. But analysts question whether a short-lived social media blitz will move the biscuit brand (which first launched in Europe before its U.S. debut two years ago) off store shelves.
Through this Friday, Sept. 19, a Morning Win microsite will serve as a hub for the social giveaway with morning-themed prizes, including coffee mugs, tote bags and a Segway for commuters.
The site also houses more than 30 dedicated, short videos designed to parody the gimmicky, hard-sell tactics that TV shopping networks are known for employing.
BelVita’s Twitter followers are prompted to tweet with #MorningWin and prize-specific hashtags for the chance at winning.
This week’s campaign is the second iteration of a broader #MorningWin social initiative that launched earlier this year.
The marketer says it has good reason to try the tactic again: Brand awareness was up 7 percent and social followers increased 30 percent during a five-week campaign in January and February. The effort also collected more than 748 million impressions, created by 1,600 pieces of content.
“It’s a very specific time frame, and that’s why we feel like Twitter will allow us to have those conversations in real time in the morning,” said Mikhail Chapnik, senior brand manager at belVita.
The September activation only runs between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET each day, and new prizes will be doled out every 30 minutes. Paid social, digital and radio promos around targeted points in the day are designed to drive traffic to the microsite.
Successfully jumping into the breakfast-market fray will be a tough task for belVita, though, particularly in terms of changing the fundamental routine of eating breakfast, said Alex Jacobs, vp, group director of social content at DigitasLBi. The agency worked with Taco Bell earlier this year to launch a breakfast menu with a digital-heavy campaign.
“When you’re trying to change behavior to go to your product over another, it’s not just introducing a new item into the consideration set; you’re breaking a very ingrained behavior,” Jacobs noted. “More and more—particularly with millennials—people are skipping breakfast.”
Nate Elliott, analyst at Forrester Research, added that the Twitter campaign may help belVita hit a tech-savvy group, but the social push alone is unlikely to spur sales. Instead, the effort’s success will be based off of a multichannel approach.
“If these guys are going out there thinking, ‘We’re going to run a Twitter contest, give away some tote bags and that will be all we need to do,’ they’ll find that they’re [sorely] mistaken,” he said. “It may create awareness, but I don’t think it will have a great impact on the people it reaches.”