After munching through a packet of Walkers Crispy Duck & Hoisin crisps, I noticed the Yahoo logo on the back of the packet. It prompted me to have a look at how the Walkers “Do us a flavour” campaign has been going; it has always seemed strange that Walkers would want to partner with Yahoo when over 90% of UK searches occur through Google.

The campaign began in July 2008 with an expected 250,000 crisp flavours entries, however Walkers received more than 1.1 million entries for a £50,000 prize and 1% share of future royalties. If the sales match those of the BBQ flavour, for example, that would equate to £57,000 a year. Votes cast on the Walkers website between now and May 1 2009 will decide which flavour stays permanently on sale, and the creator will win £50,000, on top of the £10,000 that each finalist has already received. Since the website launched it has seen a total of 2.4m sessions, with visitors spending an average of nine minutes on-line per session.

Walkers first tested its multimedia campaigning with its "Brits Trips" promotion in 2008, which generated a 2,575% growth in unique users to its website between June 2007 and June 2008.

Walkers are working with the mobile telephone network 02 to allow free text voting and have had a very powerful off-line marketing campaign with celebrity involvement, national and local press coverage and wide on-air media coverage.

All other methods are tried and tested forms of marketing, where the online partnership with Yahoo is a relatively new concept. At first this appears as a mash-up of two needy brands who both have a national audience, Yahoo with a very low UK user base and Walkers wanting to take advantage of the reach and cost effectiveness the internet can offer.

How important are Crisps to a UK consumer?
The summary section from the “Snack Foods Market Report Plus 2008" states:

Penetration of snack foods in the UK is high, standing at around 85% for potato snacks and around half the population for other savoury snacks and snack nuts. Nevertheless, the high degree of NPD and intense competition ensure that the market remains dynamic. Both the UK and global markets are dominated by PepsiCo. Research commissioned specifically for this report revealed that penetration of the US company’s core Walkers brand in the UK was above 59% in 2008, which was significantly higher than that of its nearest competitor brand, Pringles

85% of the UK’s population eats crisps or potato snacks and Walkers have a 59% market share of this consumer base. So walkers are a large player within the UK and they continue to stay in this position by promoting the brand and engaging their audience.

Offsite marketing is key to creating awareness online, Internet Marketing is becoming more like an online public relations exercise on a scale that traditional PR could struggle to comprehend and effectively manage.
Awareness is important, but it creates an appetite that needs to be satisfied. Once consumers have shown interest in the concept, the campaign website needs to continue to deliver and ensure that consumers are engaged to complete the campaign objectives.

I visited the website and was greeted with a full screen animation that took time to load, once it loaded the website had been stretched to fit my screen and the animated visuals were low quality and pixelated. When I tried to watch the TV advert for Crispy Duck & Hoisin, it had no sound although the video played.

According to Walkers, the average time spent on their campaign website is nine minutes. I wonder how much of that time is spent waiting for the website to load.
The whole website has been created in a graphic designers favourite technology, ‘Flash’. Flash has not vastly moved forwards as a platform for developing websites since its original conception.

Websites that are completely designed using flash are often accessibility and usability nightmares. Web 2.0 elements are often not included; these elements are increasingly becoming familiar to internet users and defined as a standard.

Flash elements are now common place within websites, flash offers great portability on-line and can be easily embedded into a website or page as a specific element often used to stream live data from another source.

Flash websites are also bulky in file size and this means loading times, back on 56k dial up load times were common place, but now thanks to broadband we all have become used to the lightning speeds of email, messaging, file and photo transfer. Forcing people to wait for a flash presentation to load is very off putting in a modern online world.

So why join forces with the 2.79% Yahoo UK Search Market Share?
Yahoo are offering Walkers coverage on six of its channels, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Eurosport, each online channel will take on one of the finalist flavours. Yahoo has also developed a bespoke video channel for Walkers using their Yahoo Video platform.

From a senior decision makers perspective the offerings available from Yahoo could appear as a nicely packaged solution, with everything required to launch a campaign on-line. The problem is that internet users are voting with their fingers and choose a variety of different on-line services to frequently visit.
Services such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Blogger and Social Go are all experts with what they offer, each with their own specialised user interfaces and structures that allow content to be easily shared or embedded.

The days of one service for all needs are gone, simply because no one organisation can spend enough time on all aspects of what they offer to compete with niche on-line services specifically designed and created for common needs.

Google has spread itself widely across the internet with many different websites and technology’s under its belt. Although Google seems to understand the benefit of separate specialist entity’s offering an array of services.

Where Yahoo is still trying to put all its eggs in one basket and offer one login for all needs. This is one of the reasons why Yahoo have not been as successful as Google, combined with a inadequate Search Engine algorithm that often provides irrelevant search results.
In return, Walkers have featured the Yahoo! logo on more than 50 million promotional packets of Walkers Crisps. Consumers are being urged to search for ‘Do us a flavour’ on Yahoo! which will then drive them to the video channel, to view the campaign content and vote for their favourite flavour.

Has this approach worked for Walkers?
According to Walkers, this has been a successful campaign as initially they only expected 250k entries’ for new flavours from the public. When they received over 1.1 million entries’ they were impressed with the results.

What surprises me is the minimal amount of support on-line; The DoUsAFlavourYoutube Channel has only 4 subscribers and the Yahoo Video Channel only has 7 people who have favoured the network.

Internal buy-in from the Walkers team has obviously been very minimal; I would expect that more than seven people have been involved with promoting this campaign online. It is a true sign of lack of internal buy-in and a possible reason to why the online marketing has not been as successful as it could have been.

The most popular campaign video on the Yahoo Video network has been:Cajun Squirrel…We ask Martyn Wright – How??!! it has had 21,347 views but no user comments.

On YouTube this is a different matter, the most popular video has been Gary Lineker presents: The Top T… with 51,147 views and 12 comments. The comments provide a true insight to what people think about the campaign:

• “he’s a bit dozy…. he takes the mick out ogf veggies too. veggie chicken would have been nice… "
• “tell me this isn’t the former england captain that i’d respected and held in high regard since I was a little girl. “
• “probably lineker’s worst television performance”

Only four of the twelve comments were related to the Walkers campaign objective. So it appears Youtube has offered higher views and social engagement.
To put this into perspective, nearly all the videos have been online for less than two months. The following video has been on Youtube for a month and has gained 1,433,089 views, its UK specific and shows the audience that could have been captured by Walkers.

You can watch this video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWEOHd9JNmk

Has this worked for Walkers?
Well yes it has, but the approach used has been wrong. Almost as if the Yahoo all-inclusive package was an easy attempt to move a traditional UK brand into the on-line marketing arena. Lack of internal buy-in of online marketing from Walkers has been clearly identified from the minimal support from the team behind the campaign. The over use of Lineker is tiring and the jokes don’t get any better.

People today are responding to fresh new celebrity’s and popular culture combined with a twist of humour. If one of our biggest UK brands is making these mistakes on-line, where does it leave everyone else?

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