All Natural Maine Root: Find a Partner

Most small businesses don’t have the resources for an in-house video-production staff. So, finding a partner such as an advertising agency can help get a video campaign off the ground or spiff up a lackluster idea.

But there are a couple of caveats. This option may end up costing thousands of dollars — a significant payout for most entrepreneurs, and a lot more than most companies spend on promotional videos. It’s also crucial for companies to shop around for the right partner. The videos will turn out better if the ad agency understands the small business well and plays to its strengths.

For instance, back in 2005 All Natural Maine Root LLC, an organic-soda maker in Scarborough, Maine, was looking to boost sales but had scant resources for a marketing campaign. It found a good partner in Door Number 3 Inc. of Austin, Texas. The ad agency liked the product and clicked with the company’s founders, Mark and Matt Seiler. And the agency saw the chance to do a campaign that would showcase its own creative abilities.

That led Door Number 3 to give the soda makers a big break on price. Maine Root paid about $20,000 for the campaign, but the campaign could have easily cost between $75,000 and $150,000, says Mary Pat Mueller, president of Door Number 3.

The two companies decided the best approach to the videos was comedy. “The key to a successful viral video campaign is to make people laugh,” Ms. Mueller says. “That way, they’ll want to pass it on — and, that way, they’ll look like the hero and the deliverer of the entertainment.”

The concept also fit the Seiler brothers’ personalities. “Their sense of humor is their brand,” Ms. Mueller says. “If you meet them at tastings, they’re outgoing, they’re always joking.”

Together, the two firms came up with a premise for the campaign: a mock exposé about soda. Root-beer activists pull off a late-night break-in at a corporate root-beer facility to free Maine Root soda bottles from the Director of Fructose Injection. A “Sugarcane Shuffle” rapper riffs about how “I like my root beer all natural / cause sugarcane is all my tongue will allow / All the others just taste like puppy chow / So Maine Root just stand and take a bow….”

Door Number 3 sent the videos to several sites, including YouTube, stupidvideos.com, ifilm.com, purevideo.com and tvlinks.com; it also created a dedicated site for the clips, freerangerootbeer.com. To spread the word, the agency contacted popular root-beer and soda blogs. Major media outlets, such as CNBC and CBS’s “Early Show,” also picked up on the story.

The results have been dramatic. Before the campaign began last fall, Maine Root averaged about $500,000 a year in retail sales. So far this year, sales have soared to more than $3 million. “Door Number 3 played a huge part in our success,” says Mark Seiler, Maine Root’s co-founder. “They kind of took a chance on us. And I think it really worked.”