Cure your hangover--smash a pinata on YouTube
In order to celebrate the excesses of Cinco de Mayo, Pepto-Bismol launches an app that lets you smash a variety of pinatas on YouTube in order to soothe your worried tummy.
There's something vaguely touching when a brand shows it understands your ways, rather than telling you how you ought to live.
So who could fail to admire those who market Pepto-Bismol, a substance that looks recycled, but helps you cope with your body's need to emit that which you have cycled into it?
Instead of yet another singing, dancing, nauseating advertising effort, the Bismolites have decided to align their efforts online with events that are associated with excess.
You know, like Nathan's Famous July Fourth International Hot Dog Eating Contest? And Friday Nights at Wendy's? (I'm only joking about one of those.)
So, in anticipation of the anti-acidic desperation that will be felt around Cinco de Mayo--perhaps reaching its apogee on Sexto de Mayo--the Bismolites are offering you a suitably violent way of righting your constitution.
On its YouTube channel, you can choose your pinata, your food, and your whipmaster. (Or at least I did, with the embedded results.)
I know that you, because you are that way inclined, will want to share your videos with your closest beings on Facebook and Twitter. This, thankfully, you can do.
You will even be able to enjoy Jimmy Kimmel enjoying this smashing fun on his show on May 4.
More and more brands are claiming, like the Bismolites, that they are moving their marketing dollars to online areas, rather than keeping them fixed into your flat-screen televisions.
However, brand managers will still scuttle around trying to justify the results of such fun and busily compare it to results achieved through mass marketing.
Perhaps they shouldn't worry so much. Results are such ephemeral things, with influences that are often unmeasurable or simply unaccounted for. Numbers can be frightfully political.
So, a brand manager might surely content herself that her friends can actually enjoy a piece of advertising for which she is responsible.
There is a frisson of fun to be felt when your friends can even play along with your ad, rather than telling you, over the fourth tequila in some Cincinnati bar, that they saw your TV spot and it made them feel unwell.