Puppy Tweets is a plastic tag with a sound and motion sensor that attaches to a dog collar and connects to a USB receiver in a computer. The pet owner creates a Twitter account for the dog and then can receive tweets on a smartphone or desktop.

The tag features a number of pre-recorded tweets that are activated by a dog’s activities. If the dog is running around a tweet might read, "I finally caught that tail I’ve been chasing and OOUUCHH!" Everyone knows that if dogs could tweet that’s how they would sound.

If the dog is resting it will tweet "Somedays it feels like my paw is permanently on the snooze button!" If the dog is barking it will tweet "Yahoooooo! Somedays you just gotta get your bark on."

"Puppy Tweets capitalizes on two popular trends – the use of social media and real time communication, as well as peoples’ extreme love for their dogs," said Susan Russo, Mattel’s director of marketing.

Puppy Tweets will be available at retailers in the fall for $29.99. No word yet if there will be a similar product for cats or if Puppy Tweets can alert dog owners if their pet is having an accident on the carpet.

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MattelShop.com features a social shopping tool called ShopTogether, developed by shopping application firm DecisonStep, that allows users to browse the site with family and friends. Shoppers have the ability to chat with each other in real time about the various toys offered on the site.

"We have developed a unique online shopping destination that is playful, social and informative," said Chuck Scothon, General Manager & Senior Vice President, Mattel Digital Network.

"The MattelShop.com serves as a research and shopping tool allowing parents, grandparents and gift-givers alike to choose the best toys for children this holiday season."

The site includes a complete catalog of Mattel’s brands such as Barbie and Hot Wheels along with other toys, games and licensed products from the company’s portfolio. Consumers can browse toys by age, gender and play preference.

The site also features ConciseClick that allows shoppers to watch videos of products, provides description and price and allows users to drop items into a shopping cart.

In addition, MattelShop.com has a presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
 

Scrabble and Target Go Goofus

Scrabble finds out it has a huge following on Facebook through an application that “pays homage” to Scrabble. Tapping into this fan base would be a double-word score for the game’s owners Mattel and Hasbro. Hint: Send them all a coupon for the handheld game?! Instead, they’re calling in legal to piss off thousands of potential customers.

Target has tapped into the power of Facebook.This makes their recent blogger relations move all the more puzzling.

PRNewser tells us “a Target PR rep sent the following message to a blogger questioning a recent ad campaign:”

Thank you for contacting Target; unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with non-traditional media outlets. This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest. Once again thank you for your interest, and have a nice day.

Target deals with non-traditional media outlets. They just don’t deal with the Z-Lister that reached out to them.

JCPenney Thinks Link, M&Ms Goes Green

JCPenney created what Ad Age calls “organic search equity” by aggregating blog content into a branded Fall Shopping Guide. As bloggers connected their readers to the content and people Stumble(d)Upon it, the Google Juice started flowing.

Now the site “shows up as No. 5 of 13 million results for the search term ‘fall shopping’ and second out of more than 4 million results for ‘fall shopping guide.’"

M&Ms cashed in on the urban myth equity around its green candy to stand out amongst a sea of red and pink packaging. The end result? Buzz.

Comments

And they want it taken down.

Of course, Facebookers are plenty upset about that, and are rallying behind the game.

The app, according to BBC, pulls in 500,000 daily users, and has spawned Scrabulous cheat websites so players can consult an automatic word-generator.

Classic Scrabble players join me in saying that’s just wrong. If you don’t know any words, you lose. That’s how it goes. And that’s what dictionaries and challenges are for. They’re probably in there looking for how to spell "woot" which is suddenly legal, thanks to Webster.

(By the way, it’s not always good to follow Noah Webster’s and his successors’ lead, you know. Back in the day, after he removed the Us from words like colour and behaviour, he proposed the spelling of women be changed to "wimmin" like it sounds. Thankfully, he was overruled. Unfortunately, nobody stood up to "woot." But I will make a stand.)

It’s unusual that two different companies would cry copyright infringement over the same product, but in this case, Hasbro has US and Canada rights, and Mattel has the rights everywhere else. Obviously somebody leveraged a legal loophole at some point, but that won’t matter as hypocrisy has no place in legal proceedings.

Facebookers, as has often happened, are incensed and misguided as to why, and are scrambling to keep their beloved online past time just because they love it so much, whatever the legal rights of the copyright owners.

Nevertheless, Hasbro and Mattel are pretty set on squashing the game, which was developed by Calcutta-based Indian brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, who apparently have never heard of intellectual property. Otherwise, they may have worked a bit harder to name the game something other than an obvious derivative of the original.

Then again, it may not have spread like it did. Critics have suggested that the two toy companies buy or license the game outright, or hire the brothers rather than go the heavy-handed legal route. However, it really is a golden opportunity to smack an infringer and take his idea and rebrand it properly. Think of how much they’ll save in research in development – thanks Rajat and Jayant!
 

It’s easy to guess where the people came from; Hitwise UK’s Robin Goad confirmed, “News and media websites accounted for a third of all traffic sent to Mattel.com last week, with BBC News accounting for 22.98% of upstream traffic alone.”  One possible explanation: parents were hearing about the 18 million recalled toys, and then looking for the complete list of items.

Another possibility: investors were hearing about the 18 million recalled toys, and then looking for a way out.  “Mattel’s stock fell following the recall announcement, and in response the company posted a link to shareholder.com on its homepage,” noted Goad.  “Nervous investors must have appreciated this approach, as shareholder.com was the most popular website visited after Mattel’s homepage last week, accounting for 32.04% of downstream traffic.”

Yikes.  And Mattel’s problems were also visible in terms of search queries.  “Of the 20 top search terms containing the word ‘recall’ in the past four weeks, 16 were related to Mattel, its brands or toys in general,” the Hitwise blog continued.

This sort of thing definitely defies the adage “any publicity is good publicity.”

“Following last year’s encouraging holiday season, our early 2005 results were disappointing,” said Robert A. Eckert, chairman and chief executive officer of Mattel. “We will be adjusting programs for the balance of the year with the goal of continuing to build market share and improving financial performance.”

For the quarter, net sales were $783.1 million, flat compared to $780.9 million last year, which included a benefit from changes in currency exchange rates of 2 percentage points. On a regional basis, first quarter gross sales decreased 5 percent in the U.S., and were up 6 percent in international markets, which included a benefit from changes in currency exchange rates of 4 percentage points. Operating income for the quarter was down 57 percent at $5.5 million, primarily due to lower gross margin.

The company’s debt-to-total-capital ratio of 20.2 percent is in line with the company’s long-term goal. Consistent with the seasonality of the business, during the quarter the company’s cash and equivalents declined by approximately $378 million, compared with a decline of approximately $365 million in last year’s first quarter.

Mattel Brands

For the first quarter, worldwide gross sales for the Mattel Brands business unit were $514.4 million, a 3 percent decrease versus the prior year’s first quarter. Worldwide gross sales for the Barbie brand were down 15 percent. Worldwide gross sales of Other Girls Brands, which includes Polly Pocket! and several new brand introductions, including Winx Club, Doggie Daycare and Pound Puppies, were up 10 percent. Worldwide gross sales for the Wheels category, which includes the Hot Wheels, Matchbox and Tyco R/C brands, were down 5 percent. Worldwide gross sales for the Entertainment business, which includes Games and Puzzles, were up 18 percent for the quarter, primarily driven by higher sales in male-action entertainment properties, including Robots, Batman and Megaman.

Fisher-Price Brands

First quarter worldwide gross sales for the Fisher-Price Brands business unit, which includes the Fisher-Price, Little People, Rescue Heroes and Power Wheels brands, were $264.4 million, or flat versus the prior year. This reflects strong growth in Fisher-Price Friends worldwide and Core Fisher-Price internationally, offset by declines in shipments of Core Fisher-Price in the U.S., despite particularly strong performance at retail.

American Girl Brands

First quarter gross sales for the American Girl Brands business unit, which offers American Girl branded products direct to consumers, were $67.6 million, up 25 percent, driven by the January launch of a new American Girl Today doll and continued strong performance of the American Girl retail stores.

American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (“Jobs Act”) Update

As previously communicated, the company has been studying whether, or to what extent, the company might repatriate foreign earnings under the Jobs Act. Earlier this week, Mattel completed and approved its plan for repatriation and reinvestment relating to the Jobs Act. Over the course of this year, Mattel expects to repatriate up to approximately $2.4 billion in foreign earnings and estimates that this will result in a tax liability of approximately $180 million, which will be included in the provision for income taxes in the second quarter. The amount of this estimated tax liability is based on existing law and does not include the potentially favorable effects of proposed changes to the law.

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