A Japanese advertising agency has won an international award for its campaign for Dole bananas, which saw 200 runners at this year’s Tokyo Marathon receive personalised Dole bananas with information on their finishing times and messages of congratulations from Facebook friends printed in edible ink on the skin.
“Dole banana trophy ticked several boxes – scoring on output awareness on traditional and new media fronts; business results and the penetration of key message on its energy health benefits,” said Christina Cheang, Singapore chariman of Weber Shandwick and member of the jury of the Spikes Asia PR awards.
As sponsor of the Tokyo Marathon –in which 36,000 runners took part – Dole wanted to brand its banana as the “ultimate” banana. Agency Dentsu Y&R came up with the idea of creating the Banana trophy.
Runners were first invited to participate in a Banana Trophy lottery on Facebook. The winning runners were then fitted with an RFID device on their shoe. This activated a specially designed web-based signal which posted “Just finished Tokyo Marathon 2014!” on the runner’s Facebook page when they crossed the finishing line. This prompted runners’ friends to post messages of congratulations on Facebook, which was then collected through the web and automatically printed on the bananas in real-time at the finishing line.
The Banana Trophy was broadcast on the national news and was shared 720,000 times on the web. Despite costing virtually nothing, the campaign is estimated to have reached more than 28m people and achieved total coverage worth over US$1.1m. Sales of Dole bananas in Japan increased by 115 per cent in the month following the campaign.
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