What do you do for an online presence if your new national ad campaign centers on getting people offline and into face-to-face conversations? You have the campaign’s micro-site shut down on users after 3 minutes and tell them they need to get off their computers.
Counter-intuitive? Maybe. But with tight content and an eye on the message they’re promoting, that’s exactly what Dentyne is doing with its new “Make Face Time” campaign. The website – www.makefacetime.com – lets you “find face time” by searching for hang-out spots near your current location; “request fact time” by sending a notice to your friends and has a devilish little feature called “Smiley Chamber of Doom” that shows animated emoticons meeting their bitter end.
I tried to see everything in 3 minutes but couldn’t quite get it done. And then I went back to post a link to that Emoticon video – which if you only do one thing on the site, do that – but the site is not letting me in for more fun. So they are serious about shutting down the site to visitors after 3 minutes. (Though you can sit and read about Dentyne’s product line “all day long if you want to” – the time you spend on the product pages does not count towards your 3-minute limit).
Here’s a glimpse of some of the supporting ad creative:
Read the New York Times’ deconstruction of the campaign here.
