Branded Entertainment in United States is slowly gaining more and more traction with every year. As a CPG brand, ‘Wonderful Pistachios’ had only limited experience with online communities and digital advertising - since their launch in 2009, their explosive growth had been fuelled primarily by point of sale in grocery stores and big box retailers as well as a clever series of 15-second ‘Get Crackin’ TV spots. By licensing the beloved Angry Birds franchise from our Finnish partners Rovio, we were able to open up a huge segment of the consumer base who were spending their entertainment dollars and media attention on mobile games, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as opposed to traditional television programming. We were able to leverage our licensing arrangement into a first-of-its-kind online game and instant sweepstakes with Angry Birds, and consequently giving the Angry Birds brand placement in American grocery stores for the first time.

Point Of Sale – we placed specially designed Angry Birds / Wonderful Pistachios bins, balloons, signs in 30,000 stores.On Pack - each bag sold in December had a foldout label with unique Get Crackin code and game website.TV - 15-second Angry Birds spot launched in the fall as well as released on YouTube.PR - we placed exclusive stories in Mashable as well as coverage in over 60 online publications pre-launch.Digital Ads – we created billboards wherever Angry Birds fans played the game online.Mobile Game Integration - integrated rich media banners into mobile Angry Bird game.

The results were dramatic: PR - we had over 66 online news placements at the launch of the game, with almost 220m earned media impressions.In Store - Over 1m bags distributed with our special Angry Birds label distributed into over 30,000 stores by December 1st. Along with special bins, placards, and balloons (which were hard to keep in store).Site Traffic - We experienced 245% increase in GetCrackin.com site visits versus December 2010.YouTube - Over 3.5m views on YouTube — our most popular spot of the 3-year-old campaign.Brand Engagement - We enjoyed over 4.5m minutes of fan engagement with the game and 1.4m games played.Twitter - 2,200+ tweets during the month of December yielded over 7.5MM impressions.Facebook - We increased our FB fans over 25% during the month of December.SALES - The most important result was our greatest. December 2011 was the best single month of sales for Wonderful Pistachios ever. While we can’t contribute all of these record-setting sales to a single integrated campaign, anecdotal evidence from store managers, social media postings, and our own sales force endorsed the extreme popularity of the campaign.