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Acommercial for Mentos Mints has just gone on air.
Somewhere in Greenland, a man blows a horn. More men in underpants run down to the sea. They leap in. Much splashing. Trick shots of icy spray looking like cascades of Mentos Mints.
Endline: Everyone's gone Mentos.
Is this why Mentos Mints are flying off the shelves? Hardly. Yet sales are up in the stratosphere as the direct result of a film. Just not this film.
Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz discovered that if you drop a Mentos Mint into a bottle of Diet Coke, you get a minor explosion. How they discovered this, they do not say. Nor why specifically Mentos Mints and Diet Coke. Suffice it to say, results with lesser mints are, well, lesser.
In the interests of science, Fritz and Stephen filmed themselves dropping various quantities of Mentos into 101 Diet Coke bottles.
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Adland
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Millions have been to their website, www.eepybird.com, to view the results: it's a spectacular of ejaculating bottles and I defy you not to want to try it yourself.
For years the pundits have been saying that one day, successful brand communications will be created by consumers for consumers and Fritz and Stephen have done just that: created a great ad, which involved neither client nor agency.
There's a very funny Hamlet viral doing the rounds at the moment, three years after all tobacco advertising was banned. It, too, was made by a punter for other punters.
Great brands do become public property and there's little the brand owners can do about it. Maybe that's why Mentos Mints are splashing out on their own pretty average ad: they don't want to surrender their brand. Too scary to think a 37-year-old lawyer from Maine and his mate might be the ones in control. 
FIRST POSTED AUGUST 21, 2006
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News & Comment: News & Politics
