Chiquita Gets Its Game On To Promote "Rio"

CINCINNATI, OH – In partnership with "Rio," the new 3-D animated movie from Twentieth Century Fox, to help bring the fun home to consumers, Chiquita Brands International created a microsite (http://chiquita.com/rio/) to engage parents and kids with relevant content about Chiquita Bananas and other Chiquita products. The site uses gamification, or game play mechanics, to draw users through the site and to serve up the perfect mix of interactive fun and interesting content throughout the site. The site was designed for Chiquita by Empower MediaMarketing with help from Bunchball.

"The movie's colorful and exciting story continues online for Chiquita Banana consumers," said Scott Faucheux, North America Consumer Marketing Manager at Chiquita Brands. "We created an engaging online playground for our Chiquita Banana consumer where the whole family could share in the fun of Chiquita-branded products, the film "Rio," and win great prizes including tasty Chiquita Bananas and other nutritious products."

Consumers that sign in to the site get a virtual passport and earn virtual badges for exploring pages including video clips from the movie, recipes, coloring pages, product information, games and a sweepstakes. The "Make Your Way to Rio" Sweepstakes will award one family with a trip to Rio de Janeiro, provided by American Airlines, and other prizes on the site include exclusive digital downloads and one-year supplies of Chiquita Bananas or other Chiquita products. The promotion will be open to consumers through May 31, 2011.

A Playful Site with a Progressive Sweepstakes
The sweepstakes is progressive and incorporates community badging. By interacting more with the site, users earn more virtual badges, increase the odds of winning a prize and help unlock even more prizes — as a community.

"The Chiquita community themselves have the power to unlock varying levels of prizes, increasing in value, by earning badges through differing interactions with the site," said Faucheux. "This incentivizes consumers to play more often and also interact more frequently with our brands online. With more than 65,000 badges and approximately one million page views earned to date, this aspect of the site has been popular with Chiquita Banana consumers."

Chiquita Brands International, Inc. is a leading international marketer and distributor of high-quality fresh and value-added food products — from energy-rich bananas and other fruits to nutritious blends of convenient green salads. The company markets its healthy, fresh products under the Chiquita® and Fresh Express® premium brands and other related trademarks. With annual revenues of more than $3 billion, Chiquita employs approximately 21,000 people and has operations in nearly 70 countries worldwide. For more information, please visit www.chiquitabrands.com.

Empower MediaMarketing is a marketing agency that helps clients talk to and with its customers using a mix of integrated media. For more information, visit the Empower web site (http://empowermm.com) or Empower's Gamification News Tracking Site.

Bunchball is a marketing technology company that helps sites unlock, drive and measure consumers' most valuable behavior. For more information, visit Bunchball online at www.bunchball.com.

Source: Chiquita Brands International