• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, March 31, 2016

The Trolli sour gummy brand continues to top itself with ever more surrealistic concepts for its "Weirdly Awesome" campaign.

As previously reported, in February, to promote its new Sour Brite Crawlers line, the brand released a 30-second TV spot/video that gave viewers a bizarre look inside the head of the Houston Rockets’ James Harden. 

Fans’ enthusiastic sharing of Harden’s first Trolli spot helped generate the brand’s highest social engagement to date with its core audience of Millennials and Gen Z consumers, Jill Manchester, SVP marketing and brand strategy for Ferrara Candy Company, tells Marketing Daily. The spot also increased awareness of the Trolli brand among Harden’s fan base and the broader basketball enthusiast audience, she says.

In mid-March, Trolli and its creative agency, Periscope, released another outrageous — but Harden-free — spot, also set in the bleachers at a high school basketball court. That 15-second spot features a teenage girl checking out a fellow high-school student who’s sporting a three foot-tall flat-top afro inhabited by a menagerie of live cats, dubbed a “cat-fro” or “cat condo.” 

Now, starting April 1, Trolli is launching an alternate version of the “cat condo” spot. This one features Harden in place of the teenage girl. The spot’s unspoken joke: The hoops star, famed for his large beard, has finally come up against a piece of hair more attention-getting than his own. The kicker is his deadpan reaction as a cat’s paw emerges from his beard, trying to feed him a Sour Brite Crawler. 

Both ads — or in some cases, the two spots back-to-back — will run on cable networks including MTV, Comedy Central, MTV2, Adult Swim, NBA TV and Freeform. In addition to YouTube, they are running online with NBA content and on programmatically-bought video distribution platforms. 

The videos are being supported with the brand’s own social channels; paid promotion on Snapchat, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter; and search marketing (Google, Bing, Yahoo).

Next up: Later in April — leading up to the launch of Harden-inspired Sour Brite Weird Beards gummies — Trolli will launch a humorous, three-part video series in which Harden shows viewers how to execute basketball techniques while dealing with an over-eager basketball clinic coach, reports Manchester.

The campaign is also in full gear outside of the digital and television spheres. During a Rockets home game in Houston on March 16, Trolli gave away pink beards and Sour Brite Weird Beards candy. The brand also ran a SnapChat contest in which the prize was an amount of Sour Brite gummis equaling the weight of the Rockets’ mascot, Clutch. 

Trolli will continue giveaways, including Harden-signed “Weirdly Awesome” items like basketballs and T-shirts, as well as the new gummi varieties, throughout the year. 

More Harden-inspired Trolli products will launch later in 2016.