Mentos Gum
Turning Sampling into a Sensation
Role: Creative Director, Copywriter, Content Production Lead
Mentos Gum approached my team with a tall task: Bring its global Fresh Connections creative platform to the United States for the first time. No big deal. The platform is based on a simple premise: Making fresh connections is as simple as sharing a piece of Mentos Gum.
I created a concept that asked: “If sharing Mentos Gum leads to Fresh Connections, why let sampling teams have all the fun?” Instead, we’d find one freshman at a major college campus who would share enough gum to make a Fresh Connection with every student at their school.
We’d make this student the most famous freshman in America by plastering his or her face all over campus, creating a challenge that students couldn’t resist and turning the poor kid into a hashtag. And we’d do it all during welcome week.
We partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create our experience, and DJ Khaled threw his followers behind the challenge as well. Snapchat and Instagram influencer Sara Hopkins was our host, adding narrative continuity to our campaign. We designed a bright, poppy creative system that stood out on the Madison campus and built a website and social presence that helped fans track our student’s progress and submit their own ideas for making Fresh Connections.
If our student — who turned out to be a wonderful guy named Sam — could share 43,000 bottles of Mentos Gum with the Madison campus, he’d win a year’s tuition. Better yet, the entire school would win a free concert from DJ Khaled. Win-win.
Over the course of six days, dozens of in-person activations, one home-opener football game and countless high-fives, Sam successfully created nearly 50,000 fresh connections with his new campus. He became the most-recognized guy in town, and in the end, he was in the front row for DJ Khaled’s first-ever show in Madison.
Through it all, my team powered through nearly two full weeks of prep, staging, content creation, editing, stage management and more — not to mention a summer’s worth of planning, scouting, concepting and creating. While in Madison, I supervised a video crew of 10 as they captured every moment of Sam's challenge, from the surprise reveal to the concert. I had my hands dirty in every aspect of this project: developing the initial idea, finding our campus and artist, ad copywriting — and even staging boxes of Mentos Gum in our truck before driving it onto Library Mall.
In the end, we earned more than 300 million earned media impressions, and our campaign raised unaided top-of-mind awareness for Mentos Gum among the target audience by 250 percent. We doubled Mentos Gum’s engagement rates on Facebook and Instagram, and created a one-of-a-kind experience that “added a new chapter to the long history of brands that give their stuff away.” (Those are Adweek’s words, not mine.)
Production: Flipeleven.