Part II, The Mechanics · Chapter 13

The Headliners

Brand awareness campaigns: how a sales promotion gets people talking, and how to measure it

Share a Coke: the campaign with no prize

In 2011 Coca-Cola South Pacific printed first names on its bottles and cans in Australia. It started with 150 of the most popular names in the country. Later runs added Mum, Dad and Mate, and let people vote for the next names on the list.

There was nothing to win. No code under the cap, no draw, no receipt to keep. The promotion was the pack, and the mechanic was a hunt: find your own name, or the name of somebody you meant to call. By the company’s own account, people went looking for names, theirs and their friends’, shared what they found, and searched for the brand in numbers it describes as a sharp rise. The brief, as the company tells it, asked for an idea that would “make headlines”, and it did. Coca-Cola says it sold more than 250 million named bottles and cans in Australia in that first run, in a country of just under 23 million people. That is the company’s figure, and it does not say how many of those were sales it would not otherwise have made. What nobody disputes is the fame. The idea won seven Lions at Cannes in 2012 and went on to run in more than 70 countries.

Chapter 12 opened on a line from our own office: I want a relationship with my friends and family; I do not want a relationship with Coca-Cola. Share a Coke is the best answer to that line we know, and it came from Coca-Cola. It never asked anyone to feel anything about a soft drink. It put the name of someone they already cared about on the bottle and let the brand be the thing passed between them. The relationship stayed where it belonged. The fame came to the brand anyway.

That is the Headliner, the sixth job, and the one this chapter is about: a promotion whose first task is to be talked about.

What a brand awareness promotion is for

Chapter 2 set out the six jobs and said what each one is judged on. Five are judged on sales: first purchases, repeat visits, bigger baskets, usable contacts, customers who stayed. A Headliner is judged on fame: whether people talked, wrote and went looking. The audience it most needs is often not in the shop at all. It is the journalist, the feed, the person at a barbecue who hears the story second-hand and repeats it on Monday.

Fame is not decoration. It does work the other five jobs cannot. A stranger who has already heard of you is an easier Breaker. A category manager who has already read about the idea is an easier yes at the Venue fader. A brand that people search for during a promotion is a brand that comes to mind at the shelf afterwards. But fame is slow to show in a sales line and easy to confuse with noise, which is why the job has to be named in the brief. If fame leads, say so, and agree before launch what will be counted. If fame only rides along, as chapter 2 allows, it must not change what the shopper is asked to do.

The six jobs pull on the five faders differently, and the Headliner pulls hardest on Venue. Chapter 6 said that a promotion nobody meets does not exist. A Headliner adds a second venue to the first: the shelf where the product is bought, and the conversation where the story is told. A promotion can do well in one and vanish in the other.

Marketing campaign examples that got people talking

Two tests separate a promotion people talk about from one they merely see. The first is the retell test: can a stranger repeat the whole idea in one sentence, after hearing it once? The second is the join test: can that stranger take part, today, without being chosen? The first gets the idea into conversation. The second gets it into the till.

Burger King passed both with a single sentence: we will sell you a Whopper for one cent, but only if you go to McDonald’s first. From 4 to 12 December 2018, anyone with the Burger King app who came within six hundred feet of a McDonald’s could order a one-cent Whopper, then drive to the nearest Burger King to collect it. The company geofenced more than 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants to make it work. The agency’s own awards entry reports 1.5 million app downloads and $40 million of earned media, and the work won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019. Those are the agency’s figures, written for a jury; treat them as claims rather than audited results. The design is what lasts. On the board, the reward was almost nothing, a burger for a cent. The friction was enormous: download an app, drive to a rival, then drive again. And it worked because the friction was the joke. Every person who did it was acting out the joke for whoever was in the car.

Domino’s in the United States found its sentence in a pothole. In June 2018 it began paying towns to repair roads, on the argument that a bad road ruins a pizza on the way home. The first four towns were Athens in Georgia, Bartonville in Texas, Burbank in California and Milford in Delaware; Milford’s $5,000 filled 40 potholes, and the crews stencilled the Domino’s logo and “Oh yes we did” onto the first repairs. Customers could nominate their own town, which is what turned a stunt into something people could join. The reward went to a whole street, the friction was a form, and the venue was the road outside every customer’s house.

Australia has its own. Chapter 5 told the story of the Snickers Hungerithm, which cut the price of a Snickers at 7-Eleven as the internet got angrier. Chapter 6 told the story of Monopoly at Macca’s, which was a Headliner for decades because the game was played in public, on the cup, at the counter. Put the four side by side and they share one thing besides fame. Each is a story about the category, told with the brand’s own product. Share a Coke is about sharing a drink. The Whopper Detour is about the burger war. Paving for Pizza is about getting a pizza home intact. The Hungerithm is about the moment hunger makes you cranky. None of them needed a prize to be interesting, because the idea was the reward.

The Headliner’S Sentence

Before anything else is designed, write the sentence a stranger would use to tell a friend about the promotion. If it takes more than one sentence, or needs the word “basically”, the idea is not yet a Headliner. Then guard that sentence through every approval: every condition, logo and line of legal copy added later makes it longer.

A big number is not fame

Some promotions reach for fame through the size of the number on the poster. Great Northern ran one with a very large number in 2026. From 9 February to 7 June, specially marked cases of Great Northern carried a code that opened a game in the brand’s app. Every case played won a voucher for BCF, the outdoor retailer, worth $10, $20 or $100, and behind the vouchers sat a branded fishing boat, a Kia Tasman dual cab and a camper trailer. The published terms put the total prize pool at up to $40,086,455.65, almost all of it in those vouchers, across up to 3.32 million cases. Promo-Monitor, the independent tracker quoted in earlier chapters, lists it among the leading examples of the year, with up to 3.7 million potential rewards.

Read through the faders, it is a well-built promotion. Belief is as high as it goes, because every case wins. The reward is borrowed, from a retailer whose customers fish and camp, which is chapter 7’s second move. The prize pool is a maximum exposure, not a spend, and it can only be reached if every case sells and every code is played. Its lead job is a Loader: it sells a case rather than a six-pack. Fame rides along in the number.

Whether that number made anyone outside the beer aisle talk is a different question, and the results are not public, so we will not guess. The general point stands without them. A big prize pool buys a big number for the poster. It does not buy a sentence a stranger will repeat. Forty million dollars is impressive; “every case wins a voucher” is useful; neither is a story in the way that a one-cent Whopper ordered in a McDonald’s car park is a story. When fame is the job, the money is better spent on the idea than on the total.

PR stunt or sales promotion?

A PR stunt is something people watch. A sales promotion is something people join. The difference matters because a stunt gets coverage for a day and then stops, while a promotion that people can take part in keeps generating its own story for as long as it runs: every entrant, every claim, every photo of a name on a bottle is another small piece of coverage the brand did not pay for.

The best Headliners sit where the two meet. They have the shape of a stunt, an idea big or odd enough to be reported, and the engine of a promotion, a way for anyone to take part with a purchase or a tap. That combination is harder to build than either half, because it needs the creative and the engine decided in the same room, which is the argument of chapter 5. A stunt with no way in is a press release. A promotion with no story is wallpaper.

There is one more test worth running on any Headliner before it leaves the building: what would the story be if it went wrong? A promotion built to be talked about will be talked about whichever way it goes. Chapter 7 told the story of the Pepsi jet, the prize nobody meant. The next section has the version where nobody was laughing.

When fame goes wrong

In February 1992 Pepsi in the Philippines launched Number Fever. Numbers from 001 to 999 were printed under the caps of its soft drinks, and winning numbers were announced on television, with a top prize of one million pesos. It worked, for a while: reported monthly sales rose from about US$10 million to US$14 million and Pepsi’s market share from 19.4 to 24.9 per cent, and the promotion was extended. Then, on 25 May 1992, the evening news announced 349 as the winning number. Two genuine winning caps carried 349 with a security code. About 800,000 ordinary caps carried 349 as well.

What followed was not a marketing problem. Pepsi first refused to pay, then offered 500 pesos a cap as a goodwill gesture, which 486,170 people accepted. There were protests, trucks attacked and burned, thousands of legal actions, and deaths, at least five by the most commonly cited count. The cases ran until 2006, when the Philippine Supreme Court found the company was not liable for the amounts printed on the caps.

We tell it briefly, and with care, because it shows, as plainly as anything we know, a simple truth about the job. Fame is a multiplier. It multiplies whatever the promotion is, including its mistakes. A promotion engineered to be talked about needs more of the dull machinery, not less: seeded winners checked against a list, security codes on every winning piece, cover for the error you hope never happens, and a plan for the day the story turns. Chapter 5 called the engine the place where the promise is kept. In a Headliner, it is also the place where the promise is protected.

How to measure brand awareness from a promotion

A Headliner judged on entries is like a billboard judged on how many people stopped to touch it. The scoreboard for fame has its own lines, and they should be agreed before launch.

Coverage. What was written and broadcast, where, and whether it named the brand and told the idea correctly. A story that remembers the stunt and forgets the brand is coverage for someone else.

Conversation. How many people talked about it, in what tone, and whether they retold the sentence or a garbled version of it. Tone matters as much as volume; chapter 7 and the section above are about what volume without the right tone costs.

Search. Did more people go looking for the brand during the promotion and after it than before? In October 2020 Les Binet, presenting at the IPA’s EffWorks Global conference, showed that a brand’s share of searches in its category, taken free from Google Trends, tracked market share in cars, energy and mobile phones, and tended to move first, by up to a year for cars. He was careful to call it “by no means a silver bullet”. For a Headliner it is the nearest thing to a free, public, before-and-after measure of whether people went looking.

The trade. The tone of the retailer on the phone the following week, the ranging and display the idea earned, and whether the category manager raised it before you did. Chapter 14 is about these people.

Sales, underneath. Fame is the job, but it is meant to sell something eventually. Measure it from the brand’s own sell-out data in the weeks and months after, against the same weeks before, as chapter 15 sets out, and do not hold a Headliner to a sales number inside its own run.

One caution runs through all of it. The figures that travel with famous campaigns, the downloads, the impressions, the dollar value of earned media, usually come from awards entries written by the people who made the work. Earned media values in particular are estimates, built on assumptions about what the coverage would have cost to buy. They are worth reading, and worth reading as claims. Chapter 1 promised numbers in context; for fame, the context is who counted.

Where this leaves the brief

A brief for fame usually arrives disguised. It asks for “cut-through”, or “something different”, or “a campaign people will talk about”, and it sits beside a sales target that belongs to a different job. Separate the two before anything else. If fame is meant to lead, ask the question that settles it: if this promotion worked perfectly, what would someone say about it to a friend, in one sentence? Write that sentence down. If nobody in the room can, this is not yet a Headliner, and it may be better as one of the other five jobs with fame riding along. If there is a sentence, design everything else to protect it: a way for anyone to join, an engine that cannot embarrass it, and a scoreboard that counts what was said and searched rather than how many entered.

That completes the six jobs and Part II. Part I was about how a shopper decides and how a promotion is put together. Part II has been about what a promotion is for: trial, frequency, basket, data, loyalty and fame, each with the mechanics that tend to serve it. Part III is about the craft around the promotion, and it starts with the people who increasingly decide whether a promotion runs at all, and how. Chapter 6 showed retailers running more and more promotions on behalf of the brands they sell. Chapter 14 is about working with them.