Warm Blanket Award #6: Stouffer's
Elevating your product from features and benefits to a larger emotional takeaway is always smart, especially if you do it as thoughtfully as Stouffer's has with their Let's Fix Dinner campaign. After all, why sell noodles when you can sell nostalgia.
The "Let's Fix Dinner" microsite introduces the concept with compelling (and believable) copy:
Whatever happened to family dinner?
Though it's never been more difficult, it's also never been more important to make this time to connect. The benefits of family dinner are just so powerful.
At Stouffer's, we believe there's no better place for our families than the dining room table...and we want to help you get there.
The campaign consists of:
Print Ads, including one with my favorite headline: Are your kids more likely to talk if their mouths are full? Following copy reads: Studies show 72% of teens who ate often with their families said they would go to their parents if they had a problem. Ads also connect the act of eating en famille with lower rates of eating disorders in girls, lower rates of teen drinking and drug use, and increased marital happiness.
An Online Dinner Survey: 6 simple questions about your family's habits and how you compare to other families surveyed.
A Let's Fix Dinner Challenge: An invitation to challenge your own family to eat together more often. A sticky little app that lets you keep a daily meal log, download coupons, and enter a sweepstakes.
Blogger Roundtable: Stouffer's invited 15 influential bloggers and topical experts to start an ongoing conversation about dinner in America via their own blogs, all linkable from the Stouffer's Let's Fix Dinner site.
Family Webisodes: Reality-TV style vignettes of five families all aiming to increase their togetherness time.
Facebook Integration: The campaign not only lives on its Facebook Fan page, but wall postings are sprinkled throughout the microsite.
Twitter: Under the handle Letsfixdinner, Stouffer's is introducing their campaign to hundreds of hungry Tweeples.
Short of skywriting, Stouffer's has utilized every tool available to get the word out about this initiative -- smartly using both paid and unpaid media. It's perfectly timed for tough economic times when consumers are eating out less often. And as a Creative Director, I salute agency JWT New York for producing ads that have just the right homespun tone and visual appeal.
For nothing overlooked and everything prepared perfectly, this month's Warm Blanket Award can be found in your grocer's freezer: well done, Stouffer's.
Labels: dinnertime, Facebook, Mom Bloggers, mom marketing award
Please leave your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below, even if -- no, especially if -- you don't agree with what I've written.
posted by Kat Gordon @ 10:57 AM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
I love this ad campaign, and the smart tagline "let's fix dinner" ... works on so many levels. Would also love to know your thoughts about the ubiquitous P&G campaign that's been running throughout the olympics coverage. "Sponsor of moms everywhere" seems like it's the perfect candidate for inspection by the Maternal Journal.
As a mom who fixes dinner pretty much every night, I love that you spotlighted this campaign. And I really like that tagline, too. It's so smart that Stouffer's has capitalized on the fact that families are eating in more. Yet the latent Berkeley hippie in me can't help but think of Michael Pollan's edict to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." when I read about this campaign.
JWT (much as I loathe them) hit the sweet spot of research, account planning and creative.
The CASA study that revealed the "one common thing [that] seemed to directly relate to whether kids would smoke, drink, or even do well in school ... was dinner" was a great find for the agency. Taking it on as a challenge ("let's fix it") is the kind of Big Thinking we see so little of in marketing.
Executionally ... myeh. Granted, I'm not the target. But I thought the target was too time-poor for all this interactivity.
I'd like to see what the client and agency might do to elevate this big, big idea into a national conversation. I can't help but think of "Bowling Alone" http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046 and other works that give voice to the lack of "connectedness" in American families and communities.
Let's fix dinner indeed.
Oooh, I love having such faithful and smart readers. Thanks for the comments. Jordan, I think the P&G campaign is beautiful and another example of elevating the emotional takeaway of an otherwise ho-hum category. Lauren, I also had ambivalence about the nutritional integrity of Stouffer's. Yet I think their target is typically eating at a drive-through which makes lasagna and (hopefully) a side salad slightly better fare. Fred, I love your comment about thinking the target was too time-poor for all this interactivity. I'm guessing the client purposefully offered so many ways for families to participate, knowing that few would do all, but hopefully all would do a few.
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