Advertising
INTRODUCTION
I love advertising. I grew up watching the legendary Pepsi and Nike commercials. I couldn’t believe that making commercials was a real job! Funny thing at the time: I even thought it was glamorous!
I wanted nothing more than to be in a business that combined everything I was passionate about: graphic design, filmmaking, storytelling, music and working with fun, creative people.
Over the last 20ish years, I have been really fortunate to work on some of the “funnest” Brands one could imagine. While I never worked on Pepsi and Nike, I did have the opportunity to work with many of the people and agencies that created those ads that influenced my career choice and that I loved so much. All in, between all the national launches, local promotions and test spots, I have played a role in easily over 300 commercials. Now that I’m a little older, I realize that it isn’t so glamorous, but it’s now much more fun to see an insight that leads to creative that WORKS and drives the intended results.
PIZZA HUT
I started my career at smaller ad agencies. After my Pizza Hut Client hired me to serve as the mid-Atlantic Marketing Director, my 5-year plan was to work my way up to lead the national advertising. The year after moving to the Corporate office, I reached my goal! I ended up leading Advertising/Media for Pizza Hut for the next 7 years! While I produced over 200 commercials, these are some of my favorites:
the big new yorker pizza
The Stuffed Crust Pizza had been a massive hit 5 years before. Nothing had come close to that pizza’s success. Enter The Big New Yorker Pizza. We had to make this the biggest launch in Pizza Hut history. This campaign launched during the Super Bowl and became the highest-selling pizza overnight. Looking back, a lot has happened since these ads were produced!
The 4-for-All Pizza
We used many celebrities at Pizza Hut, particularly during the Super Bowl launches of new products. In our consumer testing prior to the next big launch, we learned that EVERYONE loved the Muppets (although they couldn’t remember the last time they had seen them!). We also learned that Jessica Simpson was polarizing. Our solution? Put them together.
Obviously, this was a (much) more expensive proposition vs. featuring them in their own unique spots a la The Big New Yorker. But I was confident that it would pay off in PR impressions. I personally guaranteed to the franchisees that this (expensive) combination would land us on every entertainment news show, generate massive PR and that they could fire me if it didn’t!
This spot topped Ad Age’s list of Super Bowl commercials with the highest recall. The pizza broke the sales records of The Big New Yorker. The Muppets roared back into the public consciousness. And, oh yes, we were featured on every entertainment news show.
Cadbury Schweppes America’s Beverages
The CMO at Pizza Hut that I worked for left to work at CSAB. A year to the day after he left Yum Brands, he asked me to join him and work on their stable of Brands that included Dr Pepper, Diet DP, 7UP and more. Sensing that Pizza Hut’s innovation pipeline was running short of new places to put the cheese, I figured it was time to move on!
dr pepper
The next spot is one that never aired (for reasons I won’t go into here), but it marked a turning point for Dr Pepper. After seeing that women were just as likely to drink DP as men, we made women the hero of the spot vs. the usual “nerdy but not too nerdy” guy you see in most CSD spots (see the spot above!). This spot also featured what was a musical innovation at the time, especially for a national advertiser: a “mash-up” of several songs by a prominent DJ that reinforced the unique mix of 23 flavors.
DIET dr pepper
The previous advertising for the popular Diet Brand was based on the premise that it tasted “just like Dr Pepper”. Unfortunately, no one knew what Dr Pepper tasted like! Remember: Dr Pepper was trying to drive Trial at that time. We launched these spots based on the strategy that Diet DP was more like a dessert than anything else. DDP was satisfying on it’s own vs. “just” tasting like Dr Pepper. The Sales of Diet Dr Pepper haven’t slowed since!
7 up natural
The formula for 7UP was modified to use only natural ingredients. This differentiated 7UP and the advertising delivered on that. 7UP had positive sales for the first time in nearly a decade. Not only did 7UP start capturing more share, but this inspired the competition, specifically Sprite, to jump on the “natural” bandwagon!
Dave & Buster’s
When I started at D&B, the advertising budget at D&B was 1/10th of the budget for the other Brands I led. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t do advertising that had a big impact.
The advertising for D&B that preceded me had a fundamental issue: it didn’t convey the unique experience a Guest had with our Brand. The ads spent 2 seconds on the experience and the rest on “comedy”. I believed that that needed to be changed given we were a relatively new Brand to the vast majority of the country!
So we flipped that on it’s head, so that nearly every commercial featured what was happening INSIDE the box. We captured the fun, the winning and even the trash talk of a night out at D&B.
VIDEO: “Gold Chain" — GRETCHEN is getting this.
We maintained the “show the experience inside” principle for the duration of my tenure. The more we showed the D&B experience, the more we increased Differentiation, Relevance, Esteem and Awareness scores in the well-known Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) study. We also learned other valuable lessons:
– We needed a constant stream of new news to drive Traffic. “Brand spots” alone would not do enough to drive the business. The average size of a D&B is 40K square feet. It takes a lot of people to fill them!
– We needed to produce more than two TV spots a year. We figured out new ways to make our production and media spend go farther, so we could have new news every 6 weeks. And we saved over $3 million a year vs. current spend.
– Promotional advertising is harder to create than many think. While we tried to build the Brand in everything we did, the D&B consumer was very promotionally-driven. Crafting a compelling deal and determining the best way to communicate it in :30 (and many times in :15!) was key.
PARTNERSHIPS
We leveraged our partners. Offering the latest and greatest games was a key part of our strategy. To gain access to new intellectual property to use in the development of new games, we worked with Hollywood studios from Disney to Lucasfilm to Sony and Paramount.
In many cases, these collaborations resulted in access to actors and properties we otherwise never would have been able to afford. The Rock, Jack Black and Kevin Hart in a commercial for Dave & Buster’s? Yep. That happened. A spot that included Adam Sandler? We did that, too. Games based on the films? Absolutely. We even appeared in several films as part of our agreements!
APPLE PAY
media partners
But it wasn’t all Hollywood and Silicon Valley partnerships! Our CSD partner, Coca Cola helped provide us with ESPN’s College Gameday crew for a commercial to kick off football-watching season at D&B. Our media partners at Viacom stepped up consistently, putting top UFC fighters and their series’ stars in our spots!
