The 7-11 convenience store chain has a neat cross-promotional with The Simpsons right now - for the month of July, select locations have been turned into “Kwik-E-Marts” from the show.
We can only wait and see on how well it’s executed, but it’s a very cool idea in concept. We truly are in a time of massive cross-pollination between media forms and marketing styles; this is yet another testament to the new Gestalt - in this case, a parody of a parody!
They’re really going all out. Not just renaming products (Slurpees will, for the month of July, be labeled as Squishees), but contracting suppliers to actually create products from the show: Malt-O-Meal has created a new product to don the label “Krusty-O’s”.
The advertising concept is called reverse product placement (I’m sure the exec who came up with that term is verrrry proud of himself). Instead of a real product being placed in movies, songs, etc., an initially fictional product uses its media familiarity to make the jump into reality.
Not content to just bring fiction into reality, they’re going the other way as well (lots of “going both ways” lately, huh?), with their “Get Animated” campaign. Through their Slurpee.com website, you can be registered to win various prizes, the grand prize being a guest spot on the a Simpsons episode.
For those of you reading this who are in one of the selected cities, please visit your local Kwik-E-Mart give us your thoughts on it!
July 10th, 2007 at 1:52 am
Can you take the Simpsons/7-11 stores and map them to the local.live or google maps API?
That would really help me out.