LITAGO / KUENE BESTEMMER

The new flavour of Norwegian dairy brand TINE's Litago milk range has been selected with the aid of one green field, five young musicians, an abandoned bath and 10 cows with personality.

By way of Oslo agency DIST Creative, the integrated launch campaign spread word-of-mouth via a sweet idea and plenty of interactive social media touch points, with a Facebook and Twitter account for each individual cow.

Padding around the field, avoiding the misplaced bath and slowly converting the web from rampant ailurophilia to a Hinduistic appreciation for the cow, the beasts selected the milk by settling longest in one of 25 divided squares, each representing a flavour finalist. After five days of grazing, rice pudding emerged the winner, the drink to be launched in January 2011.

Bringing the Norwegian public into the action was bunch of bovine social media interactions. Fans could follow a Twitter feed for each cow, which updated each time the animal moved to pastures new, plus their Facebook page, featuring brand and campaign info. Consumers could also take part by trying to influence the cows' movements by voting in which square to place a series of planned cow-distracting disruptions - such as a school band performance and a carefully-placed haul of bananas.

All the action could be followed at a cartoon-ish online hub, by partner agency Jimmy Royal, where the week's fun and games were documented via live stream, tracking cow movements via a small map and capturing data on each cow's athleticism and flavour preference.

DIST director Morten Isachsen told Contagious how, in two years, the agency had helped Litago improve sales by 200% to become the fourth most popular drink after both main Coca-Cola offerings and Pepsi Max.

'Our target group is 15-25 years old so we create a Taste of the Semester campaign to appeal to students', said Isachsen. 'We let them decide on previous flavour (launches), so this time thought we would have to let cows decide.

'The whole idea has been about being a transparent brand, and being authentic and original. This was a super-transparent campaign as you could see what was going on all the time throughout. We do set out to have fun, but with the results too, and we feel to make people talk you have to be innovative and creative, as wouldn't care (about a brand) if it wasn't.'

By transporting fans through sweet countryside storytelling, DIST has certainly helped Litago establish their good n' honest 'real' ingredients, while forging valid consumer friendships. Their interactive campaigns, including a previous gaming app challenging fans to 'shake' a virtual milkshake for points, have lured 52,000 Facebook fans to the brand, out of a Norwegian population of around 5m. Results indeed.

www.litago.no/kuenebestemmer