Captain Morgan Rum launched their new campaign, Calling All Captains, in May. This campaign is primarily aimed at reaching young adult males. Well, I’m a 26 year-old female and this campaign has definitely reached me as well. It’s fun, humorous and catches your attention.

In yesterday’s MediaPost Marketing Daily article by Karlene Lukovitz, I learned about the second phase of this campaign. All I can say is, I love it!

They have incorporated a “crazy nights begin and end with a good call” portion where people can select a prankster character, customize a voice message and then send it to a friend’s phone. People can choose from being an angry bartender that yells at you for stiffing him on a tab, a cute girl in a bar or an angry boyfriend.

This is a great way to get people to directly interact with your brand. I especially love how you can customize your message by including your friend’s name, what that person was wearing in the bar that night and your name. This does make it a lot more believable. And, this message automatically goes into a person’s voicemail, so you are guaranteed it gets there. Don’t worry, the message informs the recipient that this is a joke at the end of the message. We don’t want any angry boyfriends beating some guy up for no reason.

You know what this marketing campaign reminds me of? The “reject number” phase that was huge about 5 years ago. We’ve all had that uncomfortable experience when someone asks you for your number and you really don’t want to give it to them, but you just can’t say no. Well, they invented the rejection line for these instances. There are phone numbers for all the major US cities. When a poor person receives this phone number and calls it, they hear something along the following:

Hi, the person who gave you this number, does not wish to speak to you ever again. You have been rejected. To order business cards with this phone number press 1. To hear a cheer-up reject poem press 2.

The list goes on and on, but you get the point.

I know Captain Morgan’s campaign has a great strategy behind it and has helped their Facebook fan page reach about 111,000 fans. The reject line was just something fun that probably some high school kid came up with as a joke. I do wonder how much money he/she has made off reject business cards and swag though.

I love seeing how companies are constantly directly involving their consumers more and more. It’s the way the world is going. People don’t want to sit back and watch. They want to partake in what’s going on.