Color Showdown

Last night I was watching TV (Okay, during the finale of American Idol) and a commercial for Sunsilk came on. Sunsilk has been marketing itself aggressively for the last 6+ months with the mildly annoying voice of Mario Cantone. The commercial announced a website, Color Showdown, to check out. I wrote it down on a scrap of paper and went to the bathroom. While contemplating my life, physics and the philosophy of Kant I noticed I had a bottle of Sunsilk in my hair product basket. Looks like they already got me.

Anyway, I went to the site. Cool flash stuff going on. Lots of stuff going on. In fact, too much going on. Sensory overload. Basically their running some silly challenge between blondes and brunettes. Ah, the age old debate. You answer some asinine questions and it acts as some sort of intelligence quotient. There are so many bells and whistles aimed at basically turning you into their brand ambassador. You can create your own video and submit them to the site. You can download screensavers and wallpaper for your computer, etc. Why would anyone do that? On one hand is the product so extraordinary that someone, of their own free will, would take the time to create something for them? On the other hand, what’s the incentive? Is there oodles of cash involved? I have no freakin idea, the site was too much for me to take the time dig into it.

Of course, I began to wonder how the site is doing traffic-wise. And if the ad campaign has done anything to boost the traffic on their other sites.

The Alexa data doesn’t tell you much. The corporate site Sunsilk.com has been consistently low. But really, who’d bother to go there, and ultimately how will that site help sell hair products. Nothing, it’s just there for company presence. All fine and good. You can also notice a bump on the Gethairapy.com site that correlates with the launch of ColorShowdown.com. GetHairapy.com seems to be the master branding site for the Sunsilk brand and ColorShowdown.com is a sub-campaign site.

Despite the Flash bonanza on Color Showdown, the more I dug in to all the sites/company the more I began to think how brilliant it is. Sunsilk is owned by Unilever, a major conglomerate that owns a multiude of brands like Lipton, Wishbone, Dove, Vaseline and Axe (you know the Body Spray, who, incidentally, created a racy holiday site with ladies prancing around in red undies.) This is the perfect example of a well-executed brand dump. They don’t need to sell their products online, they just need to gain appeal, show that they are as hip and cool as their target demographic. Set up as a separate branding site from their main branding site, while may not be SEO’d, is great for creating fresh brand identities.

Job well done.

Ah, but wait. The true test of a job well done…how are sales?

According to Reuters:

Consumer goods giant Unilever reported a better than expected 5.7 percent rise in first-quarter underlying sales on Thursday, putting it in line to meet its 2007 targets and helping to drive its shares to a record high.

[Unilever] reported a good start to 2007 especially from its soaps, shampoos and deodorant products.

The proof’s in the pudding shampoo.

Stats:
PR 4
Alexa 328,851
Compete 40,575

See the screenshots after the jump.