• Ad Age, Thursday, February 18, 2010 10:51 AM

There's niche marketing, and then there's Procter & Gamble's Prilosec OTC, which now aspires to be the "Official Sponsor of Everything." Jack Neff reports that the brand is looking for micro-sponsorships of its consumers and their passions, from sheltering stray pets to entering motorcycle races.

Initially, it would like to do about 1,000 deals for about $1,000 each. "We were talking about ideas and said, 'We sponsor NASCAR, we sponsor all these other things, why don't we sponsor our consumers?,'" says brand manager Robert Cleveland. "It was just a wild-hair idea is how it started, but over time it began to take on a lot of life and logic of its own."

The brand will launch ads on Facebook and Yahoo next month; to date it has been relying on word-of-mouth on social networks. It considered a more conventional loyalty program but found that consumers "didn't really like the idea of getting incentives to take more medicine." Prilosec OTC faces stiff competition from Prevacid and generics and its hefty share of market has been dropping.

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