In 2010, German law changed towards a more liberal use of product placement. For the first time in Germany, brands were able to buy product integration in TV shows and series. Thus, product placement became a media channel, taken into consideration by marketers, agencies and media owners.

But there are still restrictions: Brands are not allowed to dominate the content, the price of a product must not be mentioned, editorial staff have to agree to every single brand integration beforehand and in most cases no guarantees about brand visibility are given. These regulations make establishing a product placement very complex despite the legal opportunities and require more time than most brands are willing to invest.

Instead of placing the product directly into the show of our choice we made a spin-off and staged the product within the shows immediate context: by creating a mini-series that was aired directly after the program and which was produced with the help of user generated content. By using actors of the show, our branded entertainment campaign was as close as possible to the program without being product placement.

Our client Krüger is successfully selling instant coffee and similar convenience products. But lately, they were facing the challenge of dropping brand awareness and consequently diminishing sales for their product Chai Latte Tea. Additionally the Chai Latte brand needed to be strengthened. So in order to lead our target audience to the product again and to involve them on a high level we needed to get them to interact with the brand on a long-term basis.

Our idea: Staging an interactive online dance contest with a TV final. Why? Firstly, because Krüger Chai Latte has its Bollywood like brand world and Bollywood is much about dancing. To emphasize this we created a song and its very own choreography called the ChaiLa Dance. Secondly, we identified a perfectly fitting TV format that reaches our broad target audience: Alles Was Zählt (“All That Matters”) on Germany's biggest TV station RTL, where a dancing studio is one of the main sets.

The creative execution: Two of the soaps dancing stars called our audience to upload their interpretation of the choreography - these trailer spots were aired after the soap's episodes for one month. Additionally the trailers were shown as pre- and midrolls within RTL’s whole soap portfolio online and flanked by display ads as well as teaser ads on the soaps website and posts in social media channels.

Two attractive main prizes – a luxurious trip to India and a guest appearance in one episode of Alles Was Zählt – were used as incentive. Follow up voting trailers brought our audience to vote for their favorite ChaiLa Dance version and to participate in a raffle. The three best voted fan choreographies competed against each other in a jury-led final which was broadcast on RTL. Teaser spots with two of the soaps dancing stars who called our audience to participate in our campaign were aired on TV and WebTV.

Follow up trailer spots called our audience to take part in the next stages of our campaign as described in the next section. A display ad campaign supported the spots. Everyone was given the chance to win a prize: a luxurious trip to India, the guest appearance on the TV show for one episode and lots of other prizes. The ultimate incentive for audience to participate was the chance to see their own content on TV.

Taking into consideration that making up and taping a whole choreography for a three-minute-song and uploading it to YouTube presents a big hurdle, most of the submitted videos are a huge success. Some of the videos even feature more than 50 people so the participation rate is actually higher than the number of submitted choreographies. The high number of votes shows that the contest was of great interest even for those who only participated in the raffle. The campaign paid off for the audience and our client:

+ 55% sales

+ 200% brand awareness

+ 100% buying intention

41% aided ad recall

89% ad recognition

9.689 downloads of the song

> 100 submitted videos

> 73.500 votes

> 2.600 raffle participants