Brand: Orbit Gum (Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company)
Execution: TV, Web, Phone
Link: Click Here (to see the spot, click on ‘Dirty’)
Target: Mis-spent Youths
Rating: ** (TV)/ **** (phone)
Reviewer: David

Description:
A TV campaign that has a series of spots featuring unlikely events and an attractive British woman in aviation outfits who gives the bad protagonists a chance to clean up their act with Orbit Gum. In this spot, Snoop Dogg is addressing a high school class, telling them about life as a gangster. He has apparently said something shocking, as all of their mouths are hanging open. Then a hole opens in the floor and he is sucked down to hell where a group of middle-age women are having a social in a living room with a red couch and flames on the ceiling. Each of the women is dressed in red and sports a set of horns in the middle of her forehead. As Snoop looks around, perplexed, one woman says, “Welcome Mr. Snoop. Your dirty mouth has landed you here with us. FOREVER!” Suddenly, the blonde British bombshell in a snug pristine white balooning outfit, holding a goat on a leash appears. “Dirty Mouth?” she says, “clean it up with Orbit Peppermint.” Snoop is suddenly transported to heaven, where attractive women in white lingerie lounge. “Fabulous!” the woman says and then “For a good clean feeling, no matter what,” She says and the goat bleats.

What Works:
Wm. Wrigley has done a great job encouraging its agency Energy BBDO to produce fresh, courageous and unexpected advertising. This advertising blog has been very impressed with the campaign for Winterfresh, although we were somewhat less enthusiastic about the campaign for Juicy Fruit.  Still, Wrigley understands that advertising in a world with TiVo, YouTube and SubZero refrigerators requires bold attempts to break through the clutter.  This distinctly odd spot as well as those which precede it in this campaign qualify in this regard.

There is good branding in this spot as the Orbit Gum package makes an appearance in the middle of the spot and is instrumental in saving the [anti-]hero from his doomed fate.  The positioning is not unique to the category, but cleaning up dirty mouths does put orbit in a distinctly different place from other Wrigley brands.

The online element of this campaign is also ingenious.  Website visitors are encouraged to sign up for a Snoop Dogg personal call, during which he gives them a code to unlock sites of the website that are initially blocked.  Although it is not clear what Wrigley will do with this information (particularly the phone numbers given the size of the national Do Not Call registry), it is an impressive method of data gathering which seems to take a lesson from the rampant popularity of celebrity ring tone downloads.

What Doesn’t:
Although the impact of this spot is impressive, the brand logic is impenetrable.  Does Orbit save bad people from fates they deserve?  Does cleaning up your mouth after the fact excuse anything?  How is Orbit unusually or uniquely able to do this?  This spot does not answer these questions – it does not even attempt this.  The answer instead is that the advertising is about showing something odd and cool, repeating it enough to associate it permanently with the brand and then hope that it will make the brand cool and desirable in the process.  It is a strategy that works for a very few brands and only when the advertising is consistenly unique.  We don’t think these spots make that cut.

Branding Bottom Line:
Orbit convinces us to stop hanging out with Snoop Dogg.