"Dead Ideaville"

It's time to lay another idea to rest. Colgate Max was looking to make a major splash with a new product, Colgate MaxWhite One. This new whitening toothpaste promised to make your teeth a shade whiter in just one week.

The target was the typical young, skeptical audience with a finely tuned "bullshit" radar. In other words trying to convince them would be a piece of cake.

Colgate - "The One-Week Effect” 

The one major insight into this target that proved very helpful was that they were "progress" oriented and so were willing to try something new if there was an apparent benefit. Couple that with the fact that they were also technology savvy and bingo we had our in. Did someone just say iphone application?

We wanted to give this target a very tangible, yet fun demonstration of just how effective Colgate MaxWhite One is. So the idea was to divert a large chunk of the advertising dollars to creating and promoting a mobile application called "The One-Week Effect".

Here's how we envisioned the app working. First the user takes a teeth baring, wide smiling picture of themselves or their friends. Then, via some amazing technology (probably invented by a nine year old in Bangalore), they would be able to see exactly what their teeth looked like a week later, i.e. a shade whiter. In effect we would create the 21st century version of the before/after demo.

To further enhance the user experience we thought the app should offer other fun "future" related features, e.g. the one-week weather forecast for your area, your horoscope reading for the week.

The "One-Week Effect" app would be available for download from the Colgate website. Print and on-line advertising would support and promote it's release.

Alas it took one week for the idea to die. And we didn't see it coming.