Dairy Firms Lock Horns In X-Factor Battle

Forget the desperate Simon Cowell wannabes singing for their supper, the real battle during this year's X-Factor will be fought during the ad breaks.

That's right, two dairy companies are already whipping up quite a storm on the UK's biggest karaoke competition.

Yeo Valley and Muller both launched huge advertising campaigns during Saturday's live show and are set to battle it out during the course of the series.

In the red corner is Somerset-based minnows Yeo Valley, who hit the headlines this time last year when they launched a multi-million pound ad campaign which involved a group of rapping farmers. The hilarious ad attracted almost 2 million views and won the dairy brand a lot of friends.

Now they are back with a new $2.5million ad campaign, featuring fake boyband 'The Churned', who sing about how great farming is.

The project, created by ad agency BBH, will focus mainly on TV spots during X-Factor's commercial breaks. This will be accompanied by an online karaoke contest, where Facebook users can sing along to the Yeo Valley ad music and will be rated on their performance.

The winner of the competition will have the opportunity to feature in a 30-second version of the TV ad, which will appear as part of the live X-Factor final on December 11.

However, they face stiff competition. Yep, in the blue corner we have international rivals Muller, who have just ploughed £20million into a new campaign created by the man who spearheaded the iconic drumming gorilla ad from Cadbury, Lee Rolston.

And ad agency TBWA has assembled quite a cast of nostalgic TV characters to help them. 

They include Kit, the talking car from the hit 80s show Knight Rider, plus cartoon characters Yogi Bear, Muttley and the Mr Men. It also features a soundtrack played by a 70-piece orchestra. 

So roll up, roll up, place your bets now. Who do you think is going to win? Yeo Valley is the early favourite after attracting a lot of attention on Twitter (more so than the X-Factor contestants), but it is still early days.

All we know is it is going to be a lot more interesting than who wins the X-Factor. 

Muller: Wunderful stuff

Yeo Valley

Disclosure: Unruly is distributing this video on behalf of Muller. This post is not part of the commercial plan and is written by the editorial team at Unruly, whose opinions are always independent, sometimes scurrilous, and never knowingly under-researched.

Comments

[Patric]

The branding, design and marketing of this product have been cleverly put together. Yeo Valley has succeeded in not only launching a visually very impressive product, but one where all the key brand messages come together successfully in the graphics to complement one another.

Patric
Danforth Locksmith