• by Ken Liebeskind , June 20, 2001

As part of a branding campaign to support its salad dressings, Unilever will run a multi tiered content based campaign on the MSN network.

The campaign, for the Hellmann's/Best Foods Salad Dressings started early in June with efforts to drive traffic to a mini website MSN created for the brand. The content portion of the campaign starts today with the first in a series of 20 minute Webcasts offered at the Womencentral area of MSN. The first one, called "Refreshing your mind," will be taught by Dr. Joan Kenley who will be available after the course for live chat. Future courses with live chat will be on refreshing your body and soul.

One wonders what these courses have to do with salad dressing, but Christiane Paul, senior product manager for Hellmann's/Best Foods Salad Dressings, says, "They are a unique way to engage women online. By hosting healthy living courses on MSN, we reach our target audience of health-conscious women and are able to offer them the tools to bring out their best."

Stefanie Schlect, a marketing manager at MSN, explains that the content offerings are part of MSN's goal to customize its services for its advertisers. It has developed customized programs for other Unilever products, including the Helene Curtis hair care line. The idea is to combine content related efforts with more typical online ones like banner ads to create a complete online campaign. Schlect says Hellmann's/Best Foods is running a substantial banner campaign, which includes rich media ads that expand to full-page ads. These ads "allow them to leverage their offline creative," Schlect says, referring to clips from TV commercials that are used in the rich media ads.

The content campaign will run through August, Schlect says.

The mini site, womencentral.msn.com/bringoutthebest, includes information on healthy living, recipes and information about a contest the company is running on its main sites, Hellmans.com and Best-foods.com.

The campaign is running entirely on the Womencentral portion of MSN but is promoted with links at other areas of MSN.com.

The MSN campaign augments offline efforts to promote the salad dressings, including FSIs in major market Sunday newspapers in May and graphic panels placed in the salad dressing isles in supermarkets.