Joshua Spanier
31, Adman for Britney's Curious
By Nadia Mustafa
Fall 2005 Style & Design
David Letterman joked that it would reek of cigarettes and bubble gum.
There were hardly any glossy magazine ads or network-television spots
announcing its arrival at stores near you. Introduced in the fall, it
had only four months on shelves in 2004. Still, Britney Spears' Curious
reigned as the No. 1 fragrance launch last year, generating sales of $36
million for Elizabeth Arden and rivaling the company's most successful
debut in history, White Diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor, over a decade ago.
How did a staid, 95-year-old brand like Arden that usually appeals to
older women manage to steal teenage girls away from Wet Seal and the Gap
and get them to approach intimidating, pricey department-store cosmetics
counters without splaying Britney's image all over traditional media? It
hired Joshua Spanier. "One issue of Vogue has 60, 80, 100 pages of
advertising. How can you compete?" asks the associate media director at
ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. "We realized the conventional
way of launching a fragrance wasn't going to work with Britney's fans."
So several weeks before the scent's launch, Spanier and his team ran a
discreet banner with a photo of Britney on five websites (which, he
notes, "is minuscule in marketing terms"), including bolt.com and
alloy.com, asking girls to type in their cell-phone numbers and ZIP
codes. "Girls' cell phones have become extensions of themselves," says
Spanier. "We thought, How do we exploit the fact that girls love their
cell phones, text messaging and being online?" Spanier & Co. sent the
almost 30,000 girls who handed over their numbers a 45-second recorded
voice mail from Britney, in which she thanked them for being a fan and
filled them in on a little secret: she was working on a fragrance she
was really excited about. "The whole thing was done in
non-marketingspeak," says Spanier. "These girls felt like they had an
inside scoop about Britney. We knew they would forward the voice mail to
their friends." And they did. Some even posted the text of the message
on Britney-related online message boards.
The strategy was a first for the fragrance industry. "I've never heard
of anyone doing that before," says Rochelle Bloom, president of the
Fragrance Foundation, a trade group. "They really stepped out and were
paid back. It opened up another avenue of media contact to the consumer."
To keep the girls excited, Spanier followed up with a series of
150-character text messages "from" Britney saying things like "The guy
in my new TV commercial is really hot," prompting girls to tune in to
the first airing of the ad on MTV, record it and upload screen grabs to
the Web. Another text message included a list of nearby stores that
would be selling Curious. (Remember those ZIP codes?) "Girls were going
into department stores, saying 'Can I get Britney Spears' Curious?' a
month before it was available," says Spanier.
Elizabeth Arden's chief marketing officer, Ron Rolleston, says no other
company had used the Internet and text messaging to such a degree. "We
wanted to reach out to Britney's fans in their own space," he says. "We
had such a remarkable number of hits—half a million a day at
first—that we had to upgrade our server three times in three days."
In the end, with its viral effect, the campaign reached about 300,000
girls. "With new technology," says Spanier, "you can manipulate things
in a very quick fashion to a very powerful effect."
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