With Super Bowl® XLIV only two days away, millions of football fans are getting ready to belly up to their television sets to watch one of America’s favorite events. Not only is the entire country poised with chips in hand for the game, many are waiting to laugh heartily during commercial breaks. For this year’s game, E*TRADE FINANCIAL launched E*TRADE BabyMail, an application that allows participants to create their own talking baby messages and share them with friends.
The application, developed in conjunction with Oddcast (http://www.oddcast.com), the leader in participation marketing, is available immediately at http://www.etradebabymail.com.
“E*TRADE BabyMail helps to extend the brand equity of the E*TRADE Baby,” said Nick Utton, Chief Marketing Officer of E*TRADE. “The babies that are featured in our campaign are incredibly popular and enabling users to interact with and personalize them is yet another way to engage our audience.”
The application is very easy to use. To get started, users visit BabyMail at http://www.etradebabymail.com and pick one of the E*TRADE babies or upload their own baby photo. Voice can be added by typing into a text-to-speech application, recording by mic, recording by phone or choosing one of the hilarious pre-set messages created specifically for BabyMail. Examples of the pre-recorded messages include:
• “Hey fun fact. Money is Awesome! Hey another fun fact. You shouldn’t eat plastic. Yeah… I found that out the hard way.”
• “Hey man, remember back in the day when we used to hang out all of the time and get into all sorts of shenanigans. Now look at us, I’m a one man tradin’ machine and you are… How are you?”
Users can also upload their own photo to create the next talking baby sensation. Once created, the user-generated E*TRADE babies can be shared via email, social networks or on personal Web pages and blogs.
“We are thrilled to offer an application that helps extend the E*TRADE Baby phenomenon to the interactive realm,” said Adi Sideman, CEO of Oddcast. “Allowing users to personalize and share campaign elements increases conversation levels and word of mouth marketing. It’s a taste of the impact and value interactive commercials are set to generate in the years to come.”
