Adgully Exclusive | How 'Center Fruit' used Twitter to amplify sponsorship and yield better ROI

Though Facebook started the trend, Twitter too is gaining importance on the social media platform. From common man to celebrity, the number just keeps mounting. Naturally, advertisers and agencies too are warming up with this social platform to express themselves.

Perfetti Van Melle's fruit-filled bubble gum Center Fruit turned to the microblogging service to promote a branded content segment in the Mirchi Music Awards.

Ahead of the show, which was being aired on Colors past weekend, Bollywood celebrities tweeted a teaser video, which went viral on the digital platform.

Conceptualised by media agency Maxus, the activity saw celebrities such as Shaan, Sophie Choudhry, Eesha Koppikar and Poonam Pandey tweeting about the video.

The video featured host of the show and playback singer Shaan, who had a short clip just before he went in on the stage. During the interview, the journalist holds up the jar of Center Fruit, which gets Shaan to do a tongue wagging act.

The video finds its resemblance to the Centre Fruits' TV commercial, wherein, a singer competing with a tabla player wins the battle when Center Fruit makes the singer's go tongue wag (Kaise Jeebh Laplapayee)

This was probably the first time a FMCG brand used the celebrity tweet route to create a teaser online for amplifying a TV show scheduled later in the day.

"The idea came to his team when they saw top trending topics in the evenings in India recently tended to pick up what was being shown on television. The agency team decided to turn the tables around, and used Twitter to seed in a tease before the show went on air," reveals Sudarshan Saha, Client Leader, Maxus.

Considering the performance of Sonu Nigam in Mirchi Music Awards indeed went on to trend later in the evening once the show started on TV corroborates the hypothesis on which the Maxus team leveraged the Twitter medium.

The brand was prominently featured when Shaan held up a Center Fruit to distract his fellow host, singer Usha Uthup, making her do the tongue wagging act.

Though the numbers are yet to come, but considering the huge buzz on the digital medium, and the positive trade feedback of the show when it went on air on Colors, the Maxus ESP team feels they have delivered on a difficult brief.

"The impact of the integration lied in executing a seemingly complicated tongue wagging act in a manner which holds up the values the brand Center Fruit. The choice of the platform was dictated by the fact that even the brand commercial showcases musicians, and Mirchi Music awards is the most trusted and established show in the genre," says Shailja Vohra, National Director, Maxus ESP.

According to Saha, this innovative method shows the industry how to leverage Twitter as a medium to amplify sponsorships, and hence yield better ROI for the advertiser.

Nikhil Sharma, Marketing Director, Perfetti Van Melle India, agrees, "The quality of innovation executed for Center Fruit pushes the benchmark further on how to use multiple media, especially digital along with television, for FMCG brands."

The agency plans to take the amplification ahead with radio. In the first week of this month, contests will be held on Radio Mirchi that will have radio jockeys asking listeners to enact the tongue wagging act witnessed on TV.