Dive Brief:
- Georgia-Pacific's Quilted Northern brand and Cheap Chic Weddings have crowned Las Vegas' Kari Curletto as the winner of the 13th Annual Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest, as announced in a joint news release. The contest, launched by Cheap Chic Weddings 13 years ago, limited dress materials to nothing more than Quilted Northern Ultra Plush and Ultra Soft and Strong bath tissue, along with tape, glue and needle and thread.
- This was Quilted Northern's first year sponsoring the contest and the partnership was described as an "easy fit for the brand" by Droga5 copywriter Daniel Litzow, according to Adweek. The agency also created a short video to tease the event.
- This year's competition had 1,517 entrants and the final 10 dress designs, along with the designers' bios, are available for browsing on the Quilted Northern website, which includes an email capture field for an immediately downloadable coupon. Curletto took home $10,000 as the Grand Prize winner. Quilted Northern also partnered with The Longleaf Alliance, a group dedicated to maintaining longleaf pine stands, and pledged to plant one tree for every contestant.
Dive Insight:
While the Annual Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest has a long track record, garnering plenty of media coverage in its previous iterations, Quilted Northern is smartly seizing on the opportunity this year to showcase its products and their sturdiness in an unconventional way.
The finalists for the contest collectively used 250 rolls of Quilted Northern toilet paper for their dresses, per the release, but the intricateness of the designs makes it hard to tell the material or discern the final products from the real thing.
Quilted Northern and Cheap Chic Weddings are also promoting the competition heavily via social channels like Facebook and Twitter, which will likely get impressed followers to share and earn the brands some additional chatter and awareness. While the Annual Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest predates the social media era, it's the exact type of slightly off-kilter, lifestyle-focused and visually-oriented content that can go viral.
