By Ken Liebeskind

NEW YORK --

Should Spritzy go on stage with half a label or turn in the woman who disrupted her presentation and create a scandal? That’s the question viewers of the current episode of Unilever’s Sprays in the City animated webisodes must answer.
    The webisode series, which promotes Unilever’s Wish-Bone Salad Dressing and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter with Spritzy and Spraychel, the animated vixens who represent the brands’ handy spray bottles, launched June 13 at www.spraysinthecity.com. Two weekly episodes have played so far, with three to come. Viewers can vote to answer a question every week and sign up to win prizes, including a $10,000 New York shopping spree.   
    The webisodes also play at Gawker.com and other sites, including a series of personal blogs. They will begin running next week on ITV.
    The webisodes, which were created by Story Worldwide/New York and produced by Fatkat, Miramichi/Canada, the animation studio, were written by Terri Zimmer, Story Worldwide’s senior copywriter and Stacy Thompson, Story Worldwide’s Unilever acccount director.
    The webisodes are a spoof of Sex in the City, with the sex lives of the characters interspersed with their professional dramas, with a series of celebrity voice overs used for the male characters, including Fabio, Mark McGrath, lead singer of the rock band Sugar Ray and Timothy Gunn, a fashion designer who appears on the Bravo reality show Project Runway. “They wanted a way to promote spray bottles to women who are counting calories and portion sizes, the same target as Sex and the City,” said Ann Clark, associate creative director at Story Worldwide. 
    The webisodes also spoof celebrity blogs and viewers are encouraged to put the webisodes on their blogs and send them to friends. “They’re trying to get people to pass it around and get their e-mail addresses,” Clark said. Meanwhile, the webisodes are “like celebrity blogs, you get a private look into their world, it’s based on lonelygirl15 with a take off at the beginning of the episodes when they look straight at the camera. It’s a private diary thing.” 
    Jimmy Richards, the Fatkat director, said the animations were created digitally with Flash. “We created the characters with animatics and when they were approved we put it in animation.” He said they were drawn with a brush tool and Wacom graphic tablets.
    The sound effects were done by daCapo/Winnipeg, Canada.
    The webisodes are supported by a multi-media campaign that includes TV, print and online banners. In addition, a simulated interview with Spritzy and Spraychel and Mark McGrath has appeared on Fox & Friends and other shows. 
   “The goal is to deliver our brand message in a way that entertains, engages and develops a deeper relationship than we can achieve with traditional advertising,” Unilever Senior Director of Spreads Brand Building Keith Bobier said. “We tapped into America’s fascination with celebrity gossip, blogs and personal online video content. We are trying to reach existing customers, but also new and potentially younger consumers who are spending more time online.”  
    When asked why webisodes are being used, Bobier said they are “an increasingly relevant way of communicating with consumers. The rising penetration of broadband and new media platforms offers advertisers the opportunity to deliver high quality video content. Not only are they are a powerful form of branded entertainment, but they can have high consumer engagement, capture the imagination of consumers and communicate brand messages in an effective way.”

Unilever previously aired animated Web series with Spraychel, the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter character, in August 2005 and July 2006 and added the Spritzy character to the current series. “This is our third year of webisodes and we are building off earlier campaigns that have driven significant traffic and dramatically increased the time consumers spend with our brands online,” Bobier said.

MySHOOT Profiles