Carmelo Anthony is all washed up - or at least his energy drink is.

For those fortunate enough to live in the Colorado, Las Vegas or New York areas, you can find a real treat hiding waaaay behind the stacks of Monsters and Red Bulls. If you dig deep enough, you can find this real gem of a marketing gimmick, the C1.5 Extreme energy drink brought to you by none other than Carmelo Anthony - NBA superstar. He might even be the first of the NBA sellouts to sell out to an energy drink. If anything , this could be a lesson to all other NBA superstars - you need a whole hell of a lot more than your name to sell something, especially something this bad. Anthony's big cut of the proceeds and heavy involvement in the product's development was his main reason for getting with this project, but either he never drinks energy drinks or his agency marketing him is actually trying to kill his off-the-court career. While his game might not be all washed up, this drink certainly is.

So here is what we have learned from this mistake kids.
1 - get your distribution down. You will fail if no one can buy your drink
2 - make it taste good - no one will buy it if no one can drink it
3- make it look nice - if it is not appealing it won't make it off the shelves.
4 - get the right mix - bring on the weird stuff! try adding a multivitamin or some more milk thistle, just don't forget to load up the caffeine!
5 - market well. Make a good website. Make some great promotional materials - and drum up a name for yourself.

DON'T
1- market to just 3 cities and fight with your distribution channels
2- use graphics that are straight out of the 80's - and actually look at an energy drink or 2 before designing one.
3 - use very little energy ingredients, and hide the fact that it is Mountain Dew
4 - Hire a branding firm that does not know how to brand. Go to Blue Media Design in Arizona, or somewhere that knows the market.

Packaging: 2
This is why this product failed. Pure and simple, this package absolutely SUCKS. first, we get a picture of our superstar, donning a bright orange-tan headband. The picture of him is a badly stylized illustration of him holding a can of... not this drink. That's right , the Melo on the can is holding a different energy drink can - one on close inspection has the product name on it but nothing else the same. Of course, every other color on here is the same washed out blue and tan, not willing to fork up the bucks for more colors on the printing.
Other fun problems - you cant read the name of the drink. C1.5?? stupid name - and it is written in a VERY hard to read grunge font. Also, the name of the marketing and brand development group is on the can!! Why do I care about the Intervest Media Group? If anything, now I know to stay far far away from them.
Taste:7
Not bad - and certainly better than expected. Still, this is nothing to be erxcited about. It tastes like a caffeinated sprite. Its got the syrupy lemon -lime thing going on, which is better than the Red Bull clone I was expecting, but certainly nothing to stand this out from the masses.
Buzz/Nutrition:3
Another drink that refuses to list the caffeine content. Why? My guess is it has about 70 - 80mg, either way not really enough to feel anything. Its also got that old favorite high fructose corn syrup, great for when you want to get fat and sluggish. We get a little tiny bit of the energy drink formula, with tiny doses of vitamin B and inositol.
I think there is more buzz in a Diet Mountain Dew.

Website: 2 http://www.c15energy.com/
Another HUGE misstep, this time by neezo.com. This seems like a good company, but this design has completely failed. We get 2 videos of Anthony dunking ( something Melo is not that good at, anyways) , one HORRIBLE video filmed with an old bad quality camera, and the other as a bad flash animation of him dunking a basket. And yes, you get to sit through both of them. Then you get treat to jittering cans for no reason, and a whole site which should be in HTML but isn't for no apparent reason.The coding is bad, the design was one right off the stock photo catalog, and the html holding the flash movie was generated right out of flash - with no meta tags, no keywords, no...anything. Bad Bad Bad.

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