May 1, 2006 12:00 AM, By Betsy Spethmann

• CAMPAIGN: Sunbeam Robots
• AGENCY: Catapault Marketing
• CLIENT: Sunbeam Products
• PARTNER: 20th Century Fox

The appliance brand dove into its first-ever film tie-in with 20th Century Fox’s Robots, matching Sunbeam products to the animated film’s characters.

Sunbeam, now part of Jarden Consumer Solutions, has done very little marketing for the past several years, and its budget was relatively small. Sunbeam heard about the film project and approached Fox, which recommended that Sunbeam hire an agency to plot out its tie-in. Fox’s suggestions included Catapult Marketing, a recent spin-off of Ryan Partnership. Catapult’s integrated plan, including retail overlays, won the business.

“We needed to create contemporary relevance between moms and Sunbeam, which is considered a ‘heritage brand’—it’s something your mom owned,” says Catapult President-West Matthew Jonas. “The brand needed to recapture its luster after years with no consumer marketing.”

The multi-pronged campaign targeted moms and extended Sunbeam’s tagline “Practical solutions for everyday living.” An invention contest asked kids to create an appliance to make life easier for Mom or Dad. Top prize in the Sunbeam Everyday Solutions contest was a trip to Fox’s animation studios in New York City to see Ice Age 2 in production, and a meeting with Robots director Chris Wedge. Kids entered at Sunbeam.com; the site also had a movie trailer, profiles of the film’s nine main characters and games. The winning inventions: a bathtub filler-upper-stopper, and a multi-purpose cleaning machine.

Sunbeam touted the contest in its first-ever FSI; a swap with Women’s Day magazine put a Women’s Day coupon on Sunbeam’s FSI in exchange for a Sunbeam ad in Women’s Day.

Meanwhile, a series of innovative in-pack premiums matched Robots characters to Sunbeam products with kid-friendly activities: Sunbeam toasters carried toast stampers modeled after rogue inventor Rodney Copperbottom; mixers came with cookie cutters shaped like Rodney and tomboy Piper Pinwheeler; irons carried iron-on transfers of the movie logo and cast. Those iron-ons also served as premiums in kids’ packs at Loews Theatres concession stands.

“We didn’t have a lot of money, so we had to leverage every opportunity we could, like providing prizes,” Jonas says. “We said, ‘We’ll do anything where it won’t cost a lot of money but will get us exposure with consumers and the trade.’”

Sunbeam worked with Kellogg and Mattel on a Wal-Mart event that put sticker sheets on product displays throughout the store. Each sheet had different parts of each character; kids who collected all three sheets could assemble the characters. (Fox negotiated with Wal-Mart headquarters to make Robots a “gold” property, requiring top support from all Wal-Mart departments for Robots promos.)

Sunbeam donated prizes to Robots sponsor Val-Pak in exchange for branding on Val-Pak envelopes, and piggybacked coupon booklets packed in with 600,000 Mattel toys and 400,000 Vivendi video games.

Sunbeam’s results were top-notch: Sales zoomed 48% over the same period the year before; iron sales jumped 41% at Wal-Mart. Retailers gave the brand its highest-ever display support because the tie-in “gave the brand something to talk to the trade about,” Jonas says.

Sunbeam couldn’t afford to tie in with Robots’ DVD release, but it stayed with Catapult, which handles Sunbeam’s general advertising now, too.

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