Dunkin’ Donuts to feature Twitter followers in new advertisements

Published October 4, 2013 at 7:23 am

Great coffee isn’t all that Dunkin’ Donuts has been brewing lately. As we previously reported on this blog, the popular donut and coffeehouse chain recently aired a television advertisement comprised entirely of content captured by Vine, a video service that lets users create and post six-second videos. However, the brand’s brilliant and innovative marketing business ideas don’t end there.

According to AdWeek, Dunkin’ Donuts is turning to social media once again for its upcoming television advertisements, which involve rewarding brand loyalty in a unique way. The source reports that the company selected two Twitter followers who had posted positive updates about its products and invited them to star in their very own Dunkin’ Donuts commercials.

“You can imagine the reaction when they were told on the phone that they could appear in a national TV commercial,” John Costello, the brand’s chief marketing officer, told a group of people at the 2013 ANA Masters of Marketing conference in Phoenix this past week. “[Our team] went through thousands and thousands of tweets before deciding on those two.”

Additional details regarding the advertisements — aside from the fact that they’re scheduled to begin airing on October 14 — remain a mystery for now, though AdWeek notes that they’ll probably “run on ESPN around the brand’s season-long sponsorship of the […] Monday Night Football pregame show.”

As technology continues to evolve, so does human behavior. For brands to stay competitive, they must be willing to update their business marketing tools on a regular basis. Failure to wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak, could put them at a significant disadvantage among today’s social media-savvy consumers.