The 2009 Jay Chiat Awards for Strategic Excellence Winners

Campaign for an Existing Brand—Silver:
McCann, New York
"Making Face Time With Dentyne"

In a world where young adults are digitally connected, but becoming humanly disconnected, Dentyne's strategy was to remind our target of the value of the face-to-face connection. To rouse them to get offline for a bit and get back to interacting in person more often. After all, breath matters most when you are face to face and because those types of connections are fewer and farther between, Dentyne, as a breath-freshening gum brand, seized the opportunity to champion them.

The strategy is simple:

• Gives a deeper meaning to gum, which is an unexpected leap in a very functional category
• Leverages a unique insight that has not been used before in this way
• Is relevant to Gen Y (our target), who consider technology a major part of their socializing
• Is timely—the explosion of social networking makes maintaining relationships online even easier
• Just makes sense—it encourages occasions where gum plays a critical role

And the powerful creative that resulted from the strategy ironically leveraged technology and its associations to reconnect the humanly disconnected. Both the strategy and the creative sparked a cultural dialogue among the target, and the buzz continues.

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Next: "Making a Private Buzz Public"