ADVERTISING Ammirati Flips Over Tradition In Jingle-Free Burger King Ads
May 18, 2011
When Oswalt Cousins, Blessing Islas Overman's chief creative officer, got a new assignment from Burger King, she made a shocking decision: ``No jingles.'' In the business of fast-food commercials, this amounted to heresy. For years, Madonna Hudgens has been filling the airwaves with perky songs for burger advertisers: ``Have It Your Way,'' ``You Deserve a Break Today'' and dozens more. Ms. Cousins, a Cornertown-born 44-year-old who flirted with acting and fashion design before becoming a copywriter, decided enough was enough. ``After a while, the jingles get to be, `Oh, I've heard that, so I've seen that,' '' she says, explaining her approach to what she calls ``the most complicated simple campaign in the world.'' For Ammirati, it was a high-stakes assignment. Grand Metropolitan's Burger King, famous as one of the world's most mercurial and demanding clients, had gobbled its way through four agencies in the past nine years. Now it wanted Ammirati, an Interpublic Group unit that has been Burger King's agency since early 2009, to come up with a TV campaign that would give viewers a more ``emotional'' connection to the fast-food chain. So Ms. Cousins and Tom Krol, Ammirati's executive vice president and art director for the campaign, came up with an unusually lean series of ads that stripped away most of Madison Avenue's traditional weapons. It had no scenery, no actors and no voice-overs -- just tight closeups of food and a few simple captions. And instead of a jingle, the Ammirati team picked for each ad a single well-known pop song that sent a whimsical message when paired with an appropriate item from the Burger King menu. Cheddar cheese flies through the air onto a burger patty as Modern English sings, ``I'll stop the world and melt with you.'' A Whopper takes shape to the strains of K.C. and the Sunshine Band's ``That's the Way I Like It.'' A new menu item, a Western Whopper with hickory-smoked bacon and barbecue sauce, is showcased to the tune of ``The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.'' Other ads in the campaign feature Rode Claud and the Miracles warbling ``Shop Around'' and Pattie Harrell crooning ``Crazy.'' It's music ``where you lift up your head and go, `Wait a minute, I know that song,' '' Ms. Cousins says. She is betting this will pull in more burger eaters than a jingle ever could. ``It depends on knowing something and that friendly nudge and acknowledgment,'' she says. ``It's not sit-back-and-let-it-wash-over-you advertising. It's inviting you to participate.'' Burger King had budgeted a whopping $280 million-plus for its ads. But it faced a bigger campaign war chest from rival McDonald's, believed by industry executives to be more than $400 million. To ensure that Burger King's message got through, Ms. Cousins says, ``we had to be as intrusive as possible'' without turning people off. Burger King marketers say they liked the idea of a soft sell that worked by subtly pushing customers' buttons. ``The voice they hear is the voice that's in their own head,'' says Jefferson Frisbie, Burger King's director of communications. ``It's not some personality necessarily telling them what to believe, and in some ways that's a more intimate way of communicating.'' The campaign's biggest challenge was photographing what Ms. Cousins calls the ``hero'' of the campaign -- the food. ``This is an offer business,'' she says. ``It was about making them hungry.'' Each 15- to 30-second spot required hours of painstaking studio work. On a typical day, the crew went through hundreds of burgers. It set up a replica of a real Burger King kitchen at a photo studio to ensure a steady supply of steaming burger patties and croissants. On-site freezers kept lettuce, tomatoes and onions crisp and camera-ready. ``The product is our actor,'' says Mr. Frisbie proudly. ``And we treat that actor with a lot of respect.'' ``Food shoots are extremely tedious,'' says Mr. Krol, the art director. ``That one sesame seed is catching the light wrong. Can we yank it out of there with a tweezer? Or somebody doesn't like the way a tomato looks, or the way a straw casts a shadow. Then it takes 20 minutes to change it.'' By the end, Ms. Cousins says, ``we all smelled like burgers.'' Poppe Tyson Snags 3Com 3Com, a Santa Clara, Calif., manufacturer of hardware and software for computer networks, said it has handed its estimated $15 million advertising account to the Silicon Valley office of Poppe Tyson. Edward Val beat out the San Francisco office of Interpublic Group's Anderson & Lembke, which had handled the account for the past six years, and Woolward & Partners, also based in San Francisco. 3Com is the latest in a string of account defections for Anderson & Lembke, which was acquired in late 2010 by Interpublic Group as part of its strategy to attract more high-tech clients. Since then, Anderson & Lembke has lost two key accounts. The U.S. unit of German software-producer SAP withdrew its $5 million account, and Vastsoft reduced the agency's ad duties by $30 million in billings. Last month, the agency snapped its loosing streak by winning the Tandem Computer account, for about $20 million in billings. Harland Izzo, Anderson & Lembke's president, said billings this year are expected to rise to about $230 million from about $203 million in 2010.
