Media Decoder Blog: General Mills Adds Social Media to Product Pitch

General Mills, a marketer whose brand-building efforts date to the days when housewives listened to radio shows while vacuuming, is turning to social media like Pinterest to help bring out a new product.

The product, called Fiber One Chewy bars, is aimed at children, meaning that mothers are the target audience for the advertising campaign.

Although the campaign includes traditional elements like television commercials and newspaper coupon inserts, the social media aspects are indicative of how marketing giants like General Mills are turning to new ways to reach consumers as those consumers’ media consumption habits change.

For instance, Fiber One Chewy will sponsor a board on the Pinterest page of Hungry Girl, which began as an e-mail newsletter in 2004. About a million people now receive the newsletter each day, and there is also a Hungry Girl Web site.

General Mills had earlier turned to Hungry Girl to promote Fiber One products like cereal, yogurt and snack bars. This is “the first time Fiber One has done anything with Pinterest,” said Julia Travis, associate marketing manager for Fiber One at General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn.

“We know Pinterest is such a growing space, and wanted to test the waters,” she added, particularly because “food is one of the top Pinterest categories.”

The idea is to reach “moms who are pinning fun and creative snacking ideas on their Pinterest boards,” Ms. Travis said, and “re-pinning their ideas onto the Fiber One-sponsored board on the Hungry Girl Pinterest site,” which will be called Fiber One Chewy Snack Champs.

Those Pinterest users whose ideas are selected to appear on the board will receive a badge recognizing them as “Snack Champs.”

Lisa Lillien, creator of Hungry Girl, who is based in Woodland Hills, Calif., said the use of social media “is definitely on the rise” among her readers, citing examples like the Hungry Girl presences on Pinterest and Facebook.

“They feed each other,” Ms. Lillien said, as Facebook fans visit the Pinterest page and vice versa.

“I love to be wherever these women are,” she added.

Other aspects of the Fiber One Chewy campaign will include content on the Fiber One Facebook page, mom blogs, e-mail and banner ads on the Hungry Girl Web site. The creative agency for Fiber One is Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, part of the Publicis Groupe.

Among the other companies using Pinterest are Kraft Foods; L.L. Bean; Meredith, for magazines like Better Homes and Gardens; Sony Pictures, for the movie “Hope Springs”; the Time Inc. unit of Time Warner, for magazines like Real Simple; and Whole Foods Market.