Fighting 21st-century indigestion

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: A major marketer is plop-plopping a vintage brand character back into ads, hoping to generate some fizz-fizz among a new generation of consumers. The clues give it away that the character is Speedy Alka-Seltzer, the cheerful elf—or pixie, boy, sprite or homunculus, it was never quite clear—who sold Alka-Seltzer effervescent tablets from 1951 to 1980 with slogans like “Relief is just a swallow away” and jingles like “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a

relief it is.”

A print, online and promotional campaign from a division of Bayer is reviving Speedy, still sporting tablets for his body and hat, as a sensible and soluble problem-solver. The ads present him as a beneficent bubble-bearer for those suffering the symptoms of overindulgence, like headache, indigestion and heartburn. The new campaign aims for a narrower audience than the general one that was the focus for previous Speedy campaigns, or for recent Alka-Seltzer campaigns that featured celebrities like Peter Boyle, Kathy Griffin and Doris Roberts.

The goal is to portray Speedy as a helpful “wing man” for fun-loving men in their 20s and 30s—the type of consumers who often eat, drink and make merry to excess. Persuading them to use Alka-Seltzer for their frequent discomforts could increase sales more than courting older consumers who have cut back

on la dolce vita.

Speedy is showing up in ads in magazines like Maxim, Playboy and Rolling Stone; as the star of his own online game (alkaseltzer.com/speedy/); in commercials on rock radio stations, which offer mock salutes to gourmand treats like beer-battered shrimp (“delicious, efficient”); and even on pizza boxes, where Speedy proclaims, “A meal like this deserves an after-dinner drink.”

In research, “some younger guys we exposed him to said ‘That’s Speedy Alka-Seltzer,’ but they didn’t necessarily know about Alka-Seltzer,” said Karen McIntyre, vice-president and senior creative director at BBDO Worldwide in New York, an Omnicom Group unit working on the campaign with an online agency, Proximity Canada in Toronto, that is also part of Omnicom. The idea is to familiarize the target audience with Alka-Selzer by introducing Speedy to them as “the good-times enabler, who shows up whenever guys are being guys.”

That is underlined by the theme of the campaign: “Good times. Speedy Alka-Seltzer is there.” In most ads, he is there literally, in the form of a statuette perched on a bar or standing on a table at a steakhouse, or an image decorating the pizza boxes.