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.

Overall Budget: There was no budget for this activation other than agency fees for social media monitoring.

Media Spend: No money was spent on media.

Cost per piece: $0.

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.

This idea was a creative response that injected life into the Jamba Juice brand. During the slowest time of the year, we were able to make the most of an opportunity to promote our smoothies and generate organic engagement with our customers.

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.

On February 18th 2016, 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.