Edit: Last night I ended up having an email conversation with Yael Linen-Zuchman, CEO at Smoyz in Israel, who kindly shared some additional context to the the Kotex and Kleenex random acts of kindness campaigns I covered below.  It actually turns out that both Kleenex and Kotex are owned by Kimberly Clark in Israel and each of the brand managers were aware of the others random act of kindness campaign.  What that means is the conspiracy that I presumed was there actually wasn’t…which is a shame because the post becomes less exciting as a result!  What it does mean though is we can all enjoy the Kotex campaign for what it is, a brilliant use of an emerging social media platform to generate brand advocacy.  I’ve left my original post below as I believe that I should be held accountable for my actions and simply deleting it seems like such a cop out on my part.  Thanks to Yael for taking the time to get in touch and fill me in on the true origins of the campaign idea.

In turns out that the Kotex ‘worlds first Pinterest campaign’ is actually a surprisingly similar idea to a winter Kleenex campaign.  Kotex found 50 influential women on Pinterest and sent each one of them a personalised gift based on their interests and passions.  These gifts drove social commentary across Pinterest, Facebook, twitter and Instagram.  Kleenex on the other hand found 50 people on Facebook that were sick (based on status updates).  They then sent each individual a get well pack with a personalised message which in turn drove a ton of social commentary on Facebook!  Coincidence? Rip off?  No, both campaigns were produced by the same agency, Smoyz Creative!  Why sell a good idea to one of your clients when you can sell it to all of them!  I would love to know how the clients feel about this.

And for reference here is the Kleenex campaign again! [Read more...]