When M&M’s Ms. Brown appeared on TV screen during the Super Bowl, she represented a whole new resurgence for brand mascots. They may seem retro, but branded characters and icons are making a comeback because, as the Wall Street Journal reporter Suzanne Vranica points out above, who wants to talk to a logo?

While mascots took off in the 1950s, the use of icons had fallen out of favor in recent years ... but that was before Twitter and Facebook. Mr. Clean, for instance, has 277,000 fans via his Facebook page. The latest example: a new ad campaign by StubHub, which is using a talking tree as its mascot.Continue reading...

'Tis the season for certain types of brands. And before we get to the January marketing blowout for weight-management brands, there's something we all must get past. It's gastronomic, too, but it requires overconsumption rather than dieting. It's holiday eating — or, rather, overeating. And Pepto-Bismol is all over it.

The pink post-feast recovery remedy by Procter & Gamble has launched an opportunistic advertising campaign that uses humor, elves and lots of food to make points about Pepto-Bismol. While the references to extreme digestive distress are only oblique, however — no "plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is" jingle a la Alka Seltzer — the point is the timing of the ads.

While Pepto-Bismol ranks as one of P&G's highest-penetration brands, only 7 percent of consumers surveyed claimed to have used it over the last 12 months, according to the New York Times. So now, instead of advertising steadily throughout the year as Pepto-Bismol used to do, the company is taking a "pulsed marketing approach where we focus our spending and our efforts around times when we know people are celebrating," a spokeswoman told the Times.Continue reading...

A catchy jingle is one of the most enduring aspects of a brand, whether it’s Coke teaching the world to sing or Alka-Seltzer setting to music the sounds of its antacid in action. Oscar Mayer can boast two songs that have likely been lodged in your head for years: the opening lines are “My bologna has a first name” and “I’d love to be [or 'wish I were'] an Oscar Mayer wiener.”

But those jingles won’t be part of the $50 million branding blitz that widens the focus from bologna and hot dogs to the broader Oscar Mayer product line. As proof that this won’t be your father’s meat-products campaign, the new song representing the brand was penned by Joy Williams, who wrote a song for “American Idol” contestants that contains the ho-hum tagline, “It doesn’t get better than this.”Continue reading...