Cadbury Schweppes is back on the radar with the launch of a new product, A&W and Sunkist floats…in a bottle.
I remember getting root beer floats at my Grandma’s house in the summers of my youth so I am inclined to nostalgia about the concept, though the product might be too rich for me now. Andrew Springate, VP of Marketing, calls them “indulgent treats like nothing consumers have experienced before; one pour and your taste buds will be amazed – no work, no hassle.” Definitely too rich. But a good product idea.
The cousins that I had so much fun with over the holidays would, in particular, love something like this.
And then they would bounce off the walls for a week.
There is more to launching a product than actually getting it into market, and that is getting all of the marketing support up and running. Especially a website. In fact, it could be argued that a website is the cost of doing business these days.
And the Floats website does not work.
I will caveat that just in case it gets up and running later on (as one hopes that it does since it is in every PR clip picked up by Google). The website has not worked all morning. I began trying to view it at 8am EST and it is not past 10…and I just tried a minute ago and still no luck.
Hopefully this is not something that Cadbury interactive agency VML is to blame for. They have been taking serious heat for the debacle that was the Snapple website and, especially after reading some of the comments to that linked story, it is clear that VML cannot afford another fiasco.
Yours truly will keep digging and you can keep laughing at this case of marketing ineptitude.
the daily (ad) biz 
Sort of like when Smirnoff lauched Tea Partay but didn’t have the website up for about 3 weeks as a million some odd people watched the spot on YT
The exact same thing – how could something like this be allowed to happen?
And the site is STILL not up…
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I just posted about this on my blog as well. The site is not going up anytime soon, it’s just going to be a dead link for a while. I contacted the PR agency for this campaign, and they said the site will not go live “until later this month.”
Not sure why they even put the website in the press release.
I am an employee of the carbonated side of Cadbury Schweppes, although I don’t work directly with VML, I can say that this is another VML screw up. I work in very close proximity to the A&W (and other carbonated drink) managers in Plano, TX. Needless to say, they are pretty fed up with VML’s attitude, processes and account management.
Due to VML’s “holier than thou” attitude towards Cadbury’s agency partners, nobody wants to deal with them. – so it’s bad communication all the way around and a press release goes out without VML’s input and you get what you have here. A half-assed lunder construction page thrown up to cover VML’s slow asses.
Let’s just hope that that VML comes through on the website, but rumblings within the office down here in good ‘ol Texas is that the website doesn’t hit the mark. Of all the concepts presented, this was the only “usable” one that came close. Due to budgets, VML wouldn’t budge on any redo and they had to make this one work. People aren’t to happy about it either.
2008 will be interesting for the Cadbury and VML relationship.
what are root beer made out of?,i have to know