Hampster Send Complaints to Funny Advertising Campaign
Advertising
Not Every Bad Day Needs to End With Ice Cream
RAGU pasta sauce is adopting an innovative and funnier marketing approach with a campaign that notes a new direction for its owner, Unilever Foods, to create less utilitarian, and more playful, advertising for its food products.
With a new ad agency and new creative executive, Ragu this month is starting its "Long Day of Childhood" campaign, which highlights embarrassing childhood moments and offers a way to soothe them later — with the ultimate comfort food, a Ragu-covered bowl of pasta.
"We are trying to use humor as a way to create emotional attachment," said Mike Dwyer, Unilever's United States foods director, explaining Ragu's approach. "We want to have more fun with the family dynamic and draw on the trials and tribulations of childhood."
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Those trying moments include a mother using her spit to clean a spot of sauce off her child's face, and a father assuring his daughter that the perky hamster is, indeed, the same pet that had been ailing.
"Kids undergo a lot of things in a day. Some are funny and others are not," Mr. Dwyer said. "But one of the ways that parents can comfort their children is at mealtime."
The campaign, which began this month, is being broadcast on nine television commercials on cable and network prime time, as well as on its Web site and Ragu's YouTube channel. The first ad, which shows a young boy entering his parents' bedroom, attracted more than one million views on YouTube, but also drew complaints from viewers who objected to its intimations about sex.
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The spot's candid message: parents say to knock before entering ... now you know why. The boy is flustered by what he sees in the bedroom and the accompanying jingle says: "Parents in bed, but it's just 8 o'clock. That's why they taught you that you should always knock."
The ad then cuts to him then sitting down to a bowl of pasta with sauce and the song concludes, "You need Ragu, 'cause growin' up is tough. Give him Ragu, he's been through enough."
Many YouTube comments praised the spot, but others criticized Ragu for using a sexual situation to sell its product. Mr. Dwyer said that the ad was only one in a series that covered various childhood traumas.
"We've heard from plenty of people who appreciate the levity of the ad," Mr. Dwyer said, adding that "according to our estimates the majority of the commentary has been positive."
The campaign's inspiration was unusual: a wish list compiled by an 8-year-old boy, titled "If I were in charge of the world." The boy is the nephew of Gerry Graf, the former chief creative officer for Saatchi & Saatchi NY who left to found his own ad agency, Barton F. Graf 9000. Mr. Graf's agency handled the "Long Day of Childhood" campaign.
"I read the list while on a visit and he had things like 'make ice cream a vegetable,' " Mr. Graf, the agency's chief creative officer, said. "His ideas really made me remember that a child's day can be tough.
"When we were putting together ideas, everyone had a story. Mine was that I wanted to help my dad so he wouldn't have so much to rake. So I cut down four trees in our backyard."
Mr. Graf's colleagues wrote the lyrics for each commercial and the music was created by Butter Music and Sound of New York.
This is the first national television foray this year for Ragu, the 75-year-old company whose Old World Style Traditional Pasta Sauce is known by its red, green, blue and yellow label. Three spots are 30 seconds each, and six are 15 seconds each.
The campaign is an outgrowth of the lifestyle approach for Unilever food brands that began under Mr. Dwyer, who took over the food products division last September after a stint as head of the company's personal care brands, including Axe and Degree deodorants.
Earlier this year, an online-only campaign called "Ragu Asks," also done in collaboration with the Barton Graf agency, showed some of the goofy extremes to which mothers could go to get their children to eat. In one, a mother puts sauce on the piano keyboard to persuade her child to eat, and another spot has a mother donning Ragu-dipped spaghetti braids that her children can eat.
The approach, Mr. Dwyer said, is aimed at giving consumers a more emotional experience than simply praising the product's virtues. The current ads, for example, do not highlight the nutritional value of Ragu. Unilever says that every half-cup of the tomato-based sauce has two servings of vegetables.
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"It's very hard for companies now to offer rationales to differentiate their products," said Robert Passikoff, founder and president of Brand Keys, a New York brand research firm. "Consumers have gotten real smart about ignoring beauty shots of products, and the brand is better off with a large side of emotion in its ads."
"You need to create attention and then engagement with something that resonates," he added.
As part of the campaign, Ragu will introduce online and mobile phone apps this fall to allow parents to share their children's problems by uploading their own videos or photos and customizing the jingle's words. Some of those may later be shown by Ragu on its YouTube channel.
Ragu, which became part of Unilever when the company acquired Chesebrough-Ponds in 1986, did not disclose its spending on the campaign. Figures provided by Kantar Media, a unit of WPP, found that the brand spent a little over $26 million last year, down from about $37 million in 2010. For the first three months of this year, it spent $3.7 million on advertising compared to $11.8 million in the same period last year, according to Kantar.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/business/media/childrens-anxious-moments-are-featured-in-ragu-spots-advertising.html
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