Of Crisco And Crowdsourcing

Two things you need to know about me: I read a lot of marketing e-newsletters and I listen to old-time radio shows at work.

The former is so I can keep up with the Joneses; the latter is because … well, sometimes old-time radio takes you to a place nothing else can. And the dialogue-writing is amazing. Paul Rhymer really is one of the unsung greats of 20th-century American media.

You would think these two avocations could not get within two continents of each other – but they did, just last week.

I’ve been following the concept of crowdsourcing with great interest because I also just finished work on my master’s in communication and crowdsourcing has some interesting communication implications – to me, anyway.

I find it interesting that the idea of a marketing entity abdicating to the people significant responsibility for slogans, products, and brands is causing such a furor in marketing circles.

Brands – and marketers – have been doing it for years. The only only only thing that’s changed is the media used to do it.

The old-time radio show I listen to is called Vic and Sade. It’s sponsored by Crisco, and around five minutes of every 15-minute show is consumed by Crisco ads.

The ads are read improvisationally by the announcers, including nascent game-show impresario Ralph Edwards, Miracle Whip pitchman Ed Herlihy, and Yankees voice Mel Allen, and their folksiness further serves to personify the brand.

The announcers talk about how good Crisco is for cakes and pies and frying. They eat cake on the air and put a microphone to a pan full of sizzling apple fritters, but they also spend much of their ad time pitching the Crisco slogan contest.

Pretty simple stuff: Get an entry blank at the grocery store, write a new slogan for Crisco, mail it in. The best slogan wins $5,000 – big, big zoot in those days – and gets used in Crisco’s ad campaign.

Back then it was a slogan contest. Today we would call this crowdsourcing.

Some marketers act like brand interaction is a new thing. Hardly. Some marketers wise enough to know that brand interaction is not a new thing act like personal, immediate brand interaction is a new thing. Hardly again.

When Crisco rolled out its Sure-Mix formula in 1935, ahead of the slogan contest, it sent out women, ostensibly housewives, to distribute cans of Crisco to fellow housewives and then follow up with them on how they liked it. These women encouraged the housewives to not only tell them how they liked Sure-Mix Crisco but to tell their friends about the new Crisco.

These encounters were then reinforced nationally with re-enactments condensed into three-minute ads and dropped in front of each Vic and Sade episode – a pre-roll, if you will.

It may not be the immediate brand interaction offered by Twitter, Facebook, mommy blogging and mobile phones, but it was pretty darn quick – and likely as effective as many of today’s crowdsourcing efforts because it leveraged face-to-face communication.

Telling this story is not meant as an exercise in told-you-so. It's an exercise in common sense as good marketing.

Use the tools at your disposal to get people interacting with your brand. It might be Crisco and housewives going door-to-door, tailed by a followup visit and a slogan contest; it might be Mountain Dew and crowdsourced flavors.

It's all the same idea, and it's all part of the right way 'round when it comes to marketing.