Marketing Matrix: Kotex Gets Creative with Pinterest Campaign

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Kotex Gets Creative with Pinterest Campaign

by Jennifer Cario

Whenever a new social media channel comes out, there's always this period of waiting with baited breath while we see how marketers are going to utilize it. It's almost like the first really big campaign both gives the site legitimacy and helps remind us of the full potential. While we've all been talking about Pinterest for months, a recent campaign from Kotex is winning quite a bit of endorsement as the first totally awesome Pinterest campaign.

I've been playing around with the site and testing some marketing and engagement ideas since early last fall, and have been watching to see how the larger brands will come in and leverage it. While plenty of companies are doing a great job curating boards and reinforcing their brand, only a handful have actively worked to launch campaigns on the platform.

Then I stumbled across the campaign put together for Kotex by Smoyz, an agency in Israel. To say this campaign was brilliant in its simplicity would be an understatement. And really, that's what often makes for the very best campaigns.

Dubbed "Women's Inspiration Day," by the Kotex and smoyz teams, the campaign targeted 50 influential Pinterest users. The team took the time to browse through the pin boards of these users to get an idea of what inspired them. What they like, what they are interested in. Then they put together a customized gift for each of these Pinterest users. All the users had to do to receive the gift? Repin the image of it to their Pinterest account.

Nearly every one of the users targeted followed through with the repin and Kotex says they also posted to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram about their packages.

In fact, the smoyz team put together a little video to share the results...and the numbers are impressive.

Here's the thing that puzzles me. In writing this article, I ran a dozen or more Google searches, including some using advanced operators and I couldn't find a single posting to a blog from any of the people they targeted. I couldn't even find any of the boxes that were originally pinned to Pinterest for the campaign. In fact, I can't find ANY thing about the campaign other than the video summarizing it and the bloggers talking about the video summarizing it.

Which leads to the obvious question of why not? The video doesn't tell us the location of the targeted women. Were they all overseas, meaning I'd have to rerun my searches in other languages? It also begs the question of the true viral value of the campaign if I can't even find it when I go looking for it.

Now, I like to think of myself as a fairly skilled searcher, but I'll freely admit I don't know everything. So if anyone else out there has actually spotted any of the participants posting about their experience, I'd love to hear about it so I can amend the post and show some actual examples from outside of the video.

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