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Pat the Baker to stick with Bebo
Sunday, November 23, 2008 By Catherine O’Mahony
Pat the Baker is planning to increase its spend on social network-based marketing after what it describes as a ‘‘thoroughly successful’’ Bebo campaign this autumn.

Brand manager Oliver Durkin said the bread company had devoted 1.2 per cent of its overall marketing budget to a Bebo campaign that he said had met expectations several times over.

Launched in September, Pat the Baker’s Bebo profile now has some 3,000 ‘friends’ and close to 4,000 ‘skin downloads’, meaning users are using Pat the Baker colours on their own Bebo pages. There are also 45 pages of comments, 900 comments in all. The campaign came at the end of an 18-month long multi media communications campaign to increase the visibility of the Pat the Baker brand, which centred on the theme song of the same name.

The bakery has been running a competition inviting members of the public to record and submit video versions of the song, two of which are currently being used in a radio campaign, marking a first for the brand.

Dublin music act Robotnik is planning to release a version of the song as a single before Christmas. A young graphic designer, Eric Walsh, has developed a full animated video featuring a 1970s style version by ‘Bread Zeppelin’.’ ‘It’s fantastic fun and it has delivered ten-fold on our expectations,” said Durkin.” It’s all about having a bit of fun with a tiny bit of our budget.

‘‘We wanted to extend our radio campaign, which has been running for a year and a half and has proved great fun. Adding a video element seemed a good idea. Muzu provided the perfect technical and environmental solution to give credibility to the proposition and environment.

‘‘However, they were a relatively new site, so we decided using Bebo as a window to that world would be a good idea, as 1.7 million Irish people were already familiar with the interface.

‘‘We set out to produce consumer-generated content; we hoped we would get a few hundred friends, and a good response to the video competition. The response on Bebo has been overwhelming. The proprietorship that people feel for our brand is very encouraging.

‘‘We have clear mid-and long-term plans for this initiative, encompassing more than the music genre. We have midterm plans for drama, and we are looking at advertiser-funded programming.”

Durkin described as ‘‘totally and utterly wrong’’ an analysis of the Pat the Baker Bebo campaign by blogger Damien Mulley last week, which suggested the bakery had overpaid for the campaign and should have targeted its marketing elsewhere.

Mulley said the cost of the Bebo campaign was between €30,000 and €50,000, which would imply that Pat the Baker had paid €10 per Bebo ‘friend’.

Mulley’s blog generated a small flurry of responses and prompted Bebo’s head of sales, Philip McCartney, to defend the campaign online. He pointed out that the Pat the Baker brand would have been seen by 700,000 people each month on the Bebo homepage and insisted the campaign had fulfilled its brief completely.

McCartney also challenged Mulley’s assertion that Bebo’s audience was mostly too young for bread marketing, saying 72 per cent of the Irish Bebo audience was over 18.

Durkin said Mulley based his assessment on an inaccurate costing model and had failed to take into account the broader context of the campaign.” The beauty of the internet is the immediacy of it and the honesty of it,” he said.

‘‘Bebo is a bit like a shop counter, where we get to talk to our customers daily. The feedback we received on the characterisation of some of our products was really immediate and helpful. It really has been an insight into the Irish nation.”

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