Successful Advertising: It's The Kiss That Does It...

Old fashioned really works.

Kissing always gets results of one way or another. It could earn you a slap, a spouse or sadly a laugh ! A little bit naughty of me not to punctuate my headline. A dot or two makes all the difference, and suddenly a Kiss becomes an acronym for " Keep It Simple Stupid "...

Here in Burgenland there seem to be an abundance of competitions involving dairy products. Most of the time the prize is a car and you know what, it still pulls us in like nails to a magnet. A spiffy set of new wheels is nothing to be sneezed at !

In the last competition that I entered, the car in question was painted like a pasture / field of flowers with the company name on top of it. Bob categorically refused to even consider driving it, should I be the winner ! " Do you really want to be seen driving in this Flower power car ? " ( Just for that vain comment, I would not have let him drive it either ! )

Anyway, an Austrian dairy producer ( Stainzer ) has started a new campaign and it is just as brilliant. Simple and fun. Maybe they had an inkling how to involve those errant style conscious husbands, because the car to win is a trendy Mini with not a painted meadow in sight !

The K.i.s.s. part of this campaign, is that each carton of milk has a competition bar-code on it. All you need to do is collect 20 of them, send them in and voila, hope for the Mini to be in your driveway. Old fashioned in this day of technology, but it works ! Oh yes, I buy lotto tickets with the same fervor .

Advertisers take note: There was no need to do print or TV ads, because I discovered it quite easily when I went to buy a carton of milk. Let's be honest, do we really stay loyal to a brand when it comes to milk ? No, that little red sticker on the lid quickly made my hand change direction and pick it up ! Yep, simple works every time.

The only difficult part of it, is to cut the piece with the relevant code out of the empty carton. My Mum is even collecting bar-codes for me. I did have to bribe her with visions ( now & again only Mum ! ) of driving my Mini ! The other day I found Bob cutting out a bar-code ! The the lure of driving around our village behind the wheels of a Mini seems to be rather hard to resist....

Biggi