Advertising: An Old Campaign Learns a New Song

An Old Campaign Learns a New Song

A BRAND once lovingly mocked for commercials proclaiming it as “the freshmaker” is refreshing its approach to marketing.

The brand is Mentos, sold by Perfetti Van Melle, which became famous â€" or notorious, depending on your perspective â€" for a series of commercials from the 1990s. The cheesy spots for the Mentos flagship product, chewy mints that come in rolls, were criticized and celebrated for their ham-handed selling style, straight from the 1950s; the corny Mentos slogan, “The freshmaker”; their hokey story lines, mostly centered on mix-ups andyouthful mischief; and the silly Mentos jingle, with lyrics that seemed to have been written by someone for whom English was a second language (“It doesn’t matter what comes, fresh goes better in life”).

This week, Mentos is introducing a campaign for the chewy mint rolls that is meant to evoke the upbeat mood and cheerful tone of the original work while, executives hope, slicing off chunks of the cheese. The campaign is the first from a new creative agency for the Mentos brand, the New York office of McKinney, part of Cheil Worldwide, which is taking over from the Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

The centerpiece of the new campaign, which carries the theme “Roll with it,” is a commercial that is the return to American television advertising for Mentos. The spot is to run on cable channels that are watched by the target audience of teenagers and 20-somethings, which include the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network, BET, Comedy Central, FX, MTV, the Nick at Nite block on Nickelodeon and VH1.

The new commercial, like its predecessors, features a fresh-faced, mint-mad youth who gives strangers the “thumbs-up” sign that symbolizes optimism â€" while also serving as a device to remind consumers they can use their thumbs to pop a Mentos chewy mint into their mouths.

This time, however, the oddball jingle is replaced with a song, written for the commercial by Beacon Street Studios, and the story line is less hokey: the youth skateboards past a colorful collection of characters at Venice Beach before falling, figuratively and literally, for a similarly fresh-faced young woman.

Another way the cheese quotient is reduced is that the 2013 spot is 15 seconds long, compared with 30 seconds for the original commercials.

Perfetti Van Melle plans to spend more than $30 million in the next 12 months to advertise Mentos brand products, which include new breath mints in addition to the chewy mints, as well as pellet gums like Mentos Pure Fresh. (A stick gum, Mentos UP2U, was introduced in 2011, but has been discontinued.) According to Kantar Media, a unit of WPP that tracks ad spending, Perfetti Van Melle spent $24.3 million last year to advertise Mentos products in major media, compared with $19.7 million in 2011 and $14.1 million in 2010.

The Mentos campaign is another example of a trend on Madison Avenue known as comfort marketing, which has gained popularity in the five years since the financial crisis of 2008. Advertisers are rummaging through their attics for vintage pitches, hoping that invoking fond memories of the past may help shoppers feel better about buying products now. And to counter perceptions that brands ladling out heaping helpings of nostalgia are too outdated, the ads are updated and refreshed for contemporary sensibilities.

“We wanted to do what was right for the brand today,” said Maurice Herrera, vice president and head of marketing for Mentos and Perfetti Van Melle USA.

“The freshmaker” generated “positive, quirky attributes” for the brand, he added, and it cast “a halo onto the brand, a positive one, that allowed us to go into gum.”

“But it also posed a challenge for the brand because it suggested the benefit was ‘We make things better,’ ” Mr. Herrera said, which was widely perceived as “an overpromise.”

Another challenge came when research among consumers in their teens and 20s showed that “more than half the millennials don’t associate ‘The freshmaker’ with the brand,” he added.

Replacing that theme with “Roll with it” speaks to the millennial generation’s “positivity,” Mr. Herrera said, and to “the point of view of the brand.”

Alex Van Gestel, managing director for McKinney New York, said the new campaign includes “some of the DNA from where the brand was in the past” including its “European sensibility,” reflecting how Mentos, and the original commercials, came from Europe.

“But as students of advertising, there’s also something new we want to create,” Mr. Van Gestel said, centered on “fun and youthful optimism,” adding: “You can’t over-intellectualize in this category. It’s a mint, a joyous experience.”

In another instance of comfort marketing, New World Pasta plans this week to start running a commercial, by Millennium Communications in Syosset, N.Y., that is based on a familiar spot from the 1960s and 1970s declaring Wednesday to be “Prince spaghetti day.” The new commercial will interweave material from the original with new material, bringing back Anthony Martignetti, who appeared at age 12 in the original spot, filmed in Boston by Venet Advertising.

Other agencies will also work on the new Mentos campaign, on tasks like print and digital ads and social media. They include Mongo Industries; R/GA, part of Interpublic; and TracyLocke, part of the Omnicom Group.

A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2013, on page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: An Old Campaign Learns a New Song.