The highlight of the prank was when Ellen instructed Adele to say there was

something similar to Jamba Juice in Britain called “Swishy Chug.” Knowing

viewers of the prank would most likely take to the Internet in order to investigate

Swishy Chug, our idea was to create a fake brand around it, and use it as a

means of driving both positive sentiment and sales for Jamba Juice.

The timeline for executing and implementing Swishy Chug was approximately 6

hours; between the time the video was released online, and the time it aired live

on Ellen’s show. The first step of the execution was building a brand for Swishy

Chug. That included creating a logo, a tagline, a look & feel, and even a brand

voice, which would be expressed across different mediums. Then, we created

Swishy Chug’s signature product, “Rolling in the Beets”, which was based on a

smoothie recipe Adele described. We also created four more signature flavors

inspired by the prank, which lived on swishychug.com. We also created a

Twitter account, which went live immediately and required a team of community

managers working around the clock to capitalize on the engagement. We even

released a video of an employee creating the “Rolling in the Beets” smoothie to

keep the conversation going.

+3.4 billion impressions +10 million in earned media +62,000 unique

conversations +400% engagement +1,200 publications +120,000 coupons

downloaded 32% increase in sales on the day of the activation. Over a 2

week period sales were up by an average of 19.33%. YTD, Jamba Juice went

from –2.08% to +2.62%, an upward swing of 4.7%. $0 spent on media.

Jamba Juice’s brand is built on the fact that they only use real fruits and

vegetables in each of their products. Our strategy was to create fake content for

Swishy Chug that spread across all of the digital platforms our target segment of

millennial women would be likely to use. Swishy Chug content would drive back

to Jamba Juice content, revealing that while Swishy Chug may not be real, the

fruits and veggies in every Jamba Juice product certainly are, and offering the

consumer a real coupon, redeemable at Jamba Juice. Knowing much of the

conversation around the prank would take place on Twitter, social listening, as

well as search and response, were key to our approach, in that we’d be able to

engage with users who were already actively looking into Swishy Chug.

There is an ongoing brief for a team to monitor events that happen online and

offline and find opportunities for Jamba Juice to promote products in a culturally

relevant way. One day, Jamba Juice received an unexpected

visit from international pop star Adele. As it turned out, she was there on behalf

of U.S. talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, who watched from her TV studio and

secretly told Adele what to say. It was a hilarious prank. When a video of the

exchange surfaced online that morning, we saw a unique opportunity

surrounding this event—one that would allow Jamba Juice to capitalize on the

conversation, and use it to generate business during a period when their sales

are particularly low. Best of all, the idea had to be conceived, executed, and

implemented, all before the prank aired live on Ellen’s show in the afternoon.