• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, March 14, 2011

Apparently chewing gum has a lot in common with music and aromas. Like a pop 40 tune from your teen years or a perfume from a former love, gum flavors have the same capacity for cueing nostalgic memories of good times. Retro-candy is a cottage industry. Amazon offers Gift Boxes from vendors targeting this niche. Chuckles, Pop Rocks, Turkish Taffy, etc. are all available packaged by the decade much like golden oldies compilations.

I know that whenever I happen upon a box of Teaberry gum at a newsstand I almost always embarrass myself by recreating the famed Teaberry Shuffle from one of the great branding ad campaigns of 1960s TV.  If I piqued your memory, here is the ad (complete with Herb Alpert theme) on YouTube.

The Juicy Fruit brand is claiming revived popularity off its Serenading Unicorn series of videos and video greeting cards you can send via Facebook, Twitter or email. The deliberately amateurish unicorn puppet sings ditties that are treacle sweet in order to remind us of that signature sweetness of the Juicy Fruit flavor.

This year, the Unicorn returns riding the new trend of brands allying with Web stars. In this case, lip-synch celeb Keenan Cahill (who we also saw open last week's Jennifer Aniston Sweet Water spot) does a faux duet with the mythical pony. I have to admit I find nothing especially witty or creative about this retro gum mascot. But to their credit, agency Evolution Bureau does align the retro brand with a retro music video - DEVO's "Whip It." The video is bearable mainly to those who are old enough to recall the original video that many of us enjoyed on MTV back in the day. The visual non-sequitors, the badly staged barnyard setting, the red staircase cone hats - they are all here. 

I am not so sure that goofiness is a branding strategy, even if the Unicorn's conceptual ties to the product's "sweetness" are defensible. Most of the videos coursing through the brand's YouTube presence show only hundreds of views, with the Keenan Cahill's spot accruing 331,000 in a few weeks. Not sure what the metric of success is here.

All due respect to Cahill, I am not sure how much longer this man-child routine will stay fresh, even as music celebs seem to flock into his room to get him to lip-synch their new releases. Speaking of nostalgia, in fact, we have seen this routine before. Anyone recall Mason Reese of 70s ad fame?