Advertising — Selling Eating

KFC returns us now to the thrilling era of the catchphrase with “I Ate the Bones.”

April 30, 2013 By Charlie Hopper Leave a Comment

I can’t believe I ate the whole bones thing, is what comes to my mind.

Try the bones, you’ll like the bones. Mama Mia, that’s some spicy bones.

What’s really interesting is, these KFC ads are running simultaneously with the new K-Mart catchphrase attempt.

Talk about your zeitgeist. Does this mean that we’ll soon be battling gasoline shortages, high inflation, and a jowl-shaking president who is forced to resign in disgrace after bumbling hired thieves are caught burgling the opposition’s political headquarters in a DC hotel? Hope not, because that means we have to live through the 80s and Duran Duran again.

Hahahahahahaha.

Anyway. I enjoy those “I ate the bones” ads, and I think they do a good job of making people: 1. pay attention 2. understand what exactly is going on here which is, for some, big news and 3. tend to remember, repeat, and even re-use the line in the personal lives with their friends. There is practically no higher praise for a piece of creative work (besides, “it sold stuff”).

Let’s screen another one:

(I do like the voice of the actor who says, “Original recipe.” I wish I could talk that good.)

Here’s my only quibble. When they roll out most creative lines in other media—billboards are the classic example—often the creative team talks about it and ultimately decides to feature the catchphrase prominently, especially on media with limited story-telling abilities. Like billboards. Or parking lot lightpole signage:

It’s a mysterious sign in the parking lot that, having not seen the TV, makes the experience seem somewhat questionable. Should we go ahead and hang it up?

And if that parking lot lightpole sign said, “I just shipped my pants!” or “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!” we’d be through here. But it says, “I ate the bones!” And though there might be a viral component to this (I mostly only saw the K-Mart ad on my Facebook feed), the days are gone, gone, gone where you can assume that Mr. and Mrs. America are watching the very episode of All In The Family in which you have chosen to run your “I ate the bones” campaign. Mr. and Mrs. A. tend to miss a lot of TV ads these days.

And if you (like me, actually) are driving through town and see the lightpole sign that says “I ate the bones!” (like I did) you might be forced to think about it a little too much and come up with the idea (as I did, before I knew the score) that the bones might be ground up and included like Jamie Oliver’s nugget paste right in the goo they make the chicken from. That’s not what I really thought, but I had to consider that as one possible interpretation.

Whatever. It’s not what most people will think, probably, but it does point out that we can’t assume that anyone has seen any other part of our campaign, especially if it’s a TV campaign running in this fragmented media landscape. And we always have to consider how an uninformed person might read the sign, and whether the conclusion they might reach (or the image that might come to mind) isn’t really what we want them to be thinking.

I misinterpreted the bones!

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Filed Under: Advertising, Exploring In Real Time Together, Kind of Funny, News, Opinion

The Art of the Tease: KFC is trying.

April 12, 2013 By Charlie Hopper 2 Comments

Single-mindedness, check.

Clarity, check.

Demographically hip casual middlebrow dude, check.

Restrained, down-played, good-natured humor, check, I guess.

Racially diverse cast, check.

Enormously solid brand iconography throughout (effortlessly achieved by use of clean-looking, modern, standalone storefront with a positively giant logo), enormous check.

Effective distribution through social media channels (this showed up sponsored on my Facebook yesterday and lured me into watching it), check.

So what’s missing?

I think three things.

One is, mystery.

So many companies fail (and I am sympathetic to their dark nights of crisis on this point) to maintain mystery properly. They know most of their customers are disengaged and easily distracted and they worry that their primary message will not be delivered. That’s fair. They know that tons and tons of money is going to be spent. That’s true. Their job and reputation and ability to pay for braces when their kids get a little older is all on the line. That’s America.

But the game of marketing is simple: if I’m not actively seeking information about your company, I will only pay attention until I figure out what you’re saying (almost always concluding that it’s safe for me to dismiss the information as soon as I understand it).

Playing out the mystery is an art—teasing me just long enough to keep me engaged, not so long that I become frustrated. It’s hard to do. Taco Bell did a great job of it with their initial Locos Tacos launch. I made fun of them (see photo from my Tumblr, The Boss Told Me To Change The Sign), but it worked. I didn’t know what to expect.

[sort of a sponsored link] You might enjoy my Tumblr, which I call “The Boss Told Me To Change The Sign,” and I heartily invite you to email me contributions to it: http://thebosstoldmetochangethesign.tumblr.com/

This leads me to my second issue.

The payoff. Locos Tacos was a huge, once-every-few-years-in-the-history-of-QSR kind of payoff, so it’s a little unfair to compare KFC or anyone else to them.

But why wouldn’t this boneless original recipe product already exist? I’m more confused than anything. You had the boneless chicken already, I assume (I confess I don’t go to KFC all that often, but I assume I can get a chicken finger or two if my kid wants one) (or two). KFC of all companies has access to the recipe.

My main question after this bit of tease is, Why did it take so long?

Maybe I don’t understand it. I’m reacting as a true consumer here, not a restaurant marketer: hate to be cornered into the confession, KFC, but I don’t love you enough to know that you don’t already do this.

Which then leads me to tack on my third missing thing, which is a peeve that all advertisers end up guilty of at some point: DON’T BASE THE SO-CALLED HUMOR OF THE ADVERTISING ON HOW MUCH I LOVE LOVE LOVE YOU. It’s just lazy.

Dear Marketing Team, I know you’re simply negotiating a compromise with the C-titled people up the marketing chain whose C-suite bathrooms have marble countertops. You needed to get them to approve your storyboards, so you put a little counterfeit humor on top of a spot about how much a guy loves the product. See, the C-people almost never really understand how communication works. That’s not their gift. Their gift is climbing the ladder.

Making the humor toothless and easy-to-approve is never a good (or original) recipe for success.

And I have to say: this ad is toothless. Which is appropriate for a product that’s boneless, I guess.

So even though a lot of the elements are in place for KFC’s teaser campaign, well, I pretty quickly figure out, “Oh, they’re breading chicken fingers with their original recipe. That’s probably pretty good but I’m surprised they weren’t doing it already. They sure are hyping it, aren’t they? Well, I just got a text on my iPhone and I’m going to think about something else now.”

Maybe that’s enough of an impression and a success. But is “enough” really enough?

Oh, and I see by my Facebook feed that now they’ve borrowed some interest from Daym Drops by giving him a “preview.” I know you’re not a super official journalist, Daym, but I really like you. Be careful with your objectivity, because your credibility grows out of it. Just sayin’.

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Filed Under: Advertising, Cliché, Opinion, Social Thinking

The Best Times of My Life Have Been Had Around Tables.

April 9, 2013 By Charlie Hopper Leave a Comment

And most of those were in restaurants.

Laughing, being laughed at, being laughed with. Making big decisions about life. Making little decisions about the nerdy details of favorite movies and books. Connecting with people I care about, or realizing that I care about someone I barely knew when we sat down.

I think this aspect of restaurant marketing is generally missing from most communications. For years I’ve thought this.

It didn’t help that the restaurant’s most fervent disciple was famously overweight and eventually lost the ability to eat. His eloquence made up for it.

Today I take as my inspiration an article in The New York Times, which I “rabbit-holed” my way to while reading one of the many encomiums that have come pouring out of the internet upon the passing of Roger Ebert.

Here is the passage of the the Times piece that applies here (referencing the fact, in case you don’t know it, that a few years ago Ebert was diagnosed with cancer and lost his jaw, taste buds, and ability to eat—which, almost ironically, sent America’s highest profile movie critic into a whole new level of wise and witty communications through blogs and social media):

But he remembers everything about the food at the Steak ’n Shake. In the hospital, he told me, he ate Steak ’n Shake meals a bite at a time in his mind. Still, what he longs for most is the talk and fellowship of the table.

“The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss,” he wrote…

If you poke at this blog you know I had a nearly two-decade relationship with Steak ’n Shake, developing marketing. When I was a dedicated promoter of Steak ’n Shake (it’s very important to me that the apostrophe be a true apostrophe, not a hash mark, and that it scoop to the left like an apostrophe and not to the right like an open-single-quote, which is what your computer wants to do if you don’t control it), I was pleased and proud of Roger’s love of the brand, because I felt it, too. And he was always so eloquent about it.

There is something vivid about moments spent bonding in the spaces provided by a certain kind of restaurant that cannot be exaggerated.

This is why “Home Meal Replacement” and carry-out have only been small profit centers for most restaurants. It’s those tables that make your restaurant valuable. In a lot of cases, your delicious food that you spent months researching in the test kitchen and thousands maybe millions bringing to market is nothing more than rent.

People agree to pay the rent and eat the food just so they can sit there in your place of business.

Those renters who have Big Moments are fans for life. They develop a love and an attachment that goes beyond anything you could reasonably ask.

So why don’t more restaurants actively promote or enable these moments?

Sonic does a good job suggesting it (even better when the campaign featured three or four different recurring pairs of customers enjoying their time in the car instead of just the two guys). Olive Garden does such a ham-fisted job of falsely, manipulatively evoking restaurant-table-camaraderie it’s become a punchline.

Friday’s does a good job with its kid menus, encouraging parents and kids to relate to each other.

But this is an area that could stand more deliberate leveraging, in my opinion.

The Fellowship of the Table.

Okay, not literally.

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Filed Under: Advertising, Exploring In Real Time Together, Opinion

That’s not how you throw a chair, Applebee’s.

April 2, 2013 By Charlie Hopper 2 Comments

My wife was actually at the IU game where Coach “Anger Issues” Knight threw that infamous chair. It was a childish thing to do, but he was The General and the tolerance in the mid-80s was way, way, way more than zero, so he got by with it.

I guess it’s okay to joke about now, since he’s a harmless senior citizen.

Whatever. He’s not the first person to misbehave in the state of Indiana and turn it into something to talk about for money.

What I will say is this: when a brand starts borrowing old jokes from randomly placed mini-celebrities to sell its $20 Bourbon Street whatever-they-saids, I think they have abandoned any hope of figuring out what makes them different from everybody else. We might enjoy visiting with the celebs and mini-celebs, but whatever implied endorsement they make is pretty irrelevant, and in the end all it does it make you say, “Did you see Knight in that ad? It was for a restaurant or something.”

I think Applebee’s current agency—a talented bunch of people, by reputation—started out trying to position them with at least a clear point of view.

But those days are gone. Apparently.

So many of these big chains struggle to come up with a clear strategy, an “own-able” voice, and a promise that separates them in some way from the next restaurant on the strip by the mall.

So they do a temporary fix. They bask mildly in some other entity’s glow. In the old days we called this “borrowed interest.”

By the way, friend of the blog Eric pointed out that this ad also borrows interest (noticeable if you’re one of the 15 million who viewed this stupid thing) of the following meme bait.

Advice? Do not invest any time in the preceding YouTube video. I’d sooner have you put on the 10-hour loop of Nyan cat. It’s way more enjoyable. (Fun note: I went to get the link for Nyan cat and there was a :15-second ad for Olive Garden right before the ten endless hours begins. Who’s borrowing whose interest, now?)

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Filed Under: Advertising, Cliché, Kind of Funny, Opinion, Social Thinking