I’m a principal at Young & Laramore.
For over two and a half decades, I’ve been dissecting, debating and creating restaurant marketing.
Possible points of interest:
• In 2010 I spoke about effective restaurant communications at the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago to a large room full of people who paid attention the whole time.
• I boast (in a quiet, self-deprecating way) a typical list of cool advertising awards most people haven’t heard of (One Show, Communication Arts Ad Annual) and my work has appeared in many of the industry publications that nobody really reads now that we have an internet (Archive, Graphis). Some of that work was for a regional burger chain called Steak ’n Shake, some was for packaged good foods such as Ugly Mug Coffee and Wick Fowler’s 2-Alarm Chili. Some of the work, admittedly, has nothing to do with food.
• Among my favorite achievements are (a) that someone once called a client of mine to say they had to pull their car over because they were laughing so hard at a radio spot I wrote they were afraid they were going to wreck; (b) I wrote some of the original trayliners for McDonald’s infamous McDLTs, pointing out how the hot stays hot and the cool stays cool; and (c) six different CEOs and CMOs credited our Steak ’n Shake campaign as the main engine of growth as the chain went from 150 restaurants to over 500 while we were handling everything—from TV ads to chili pepper bottle labels. A quote about our campaign from Nation’s Restaurant News I always liked: “They respect the intelligence of consumers. They set Steak ’n Shake apart from the competition without resorting to gimmicks or stale jokes….”
• If you reverse the initial consonants of my name, I become Harley Chopper.
Tom’s Diner photo credit: Tom (no relation to eponymous diner) Denari
