Meet the meat of your dreams
Foodstuffs New Zealand
Issue 25 | December 2012
Agency
Draftfcb NZ
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Regan Grafton Creative Lead: Kelly Lovelock Creative: Peter Vegas, Adam Taylor, Antony Bell
Production Team
Producer: Monique Hawkins Senior Account Director: Dominic Henshall Senior Account Manager: Crystal Clark Account Executive: Ida Levick
Date
August 2012
Background
PAK’nSAVE is New Zealand’s cheapest supermarket chain. Their low prices are a hit with Kiwis and so was their low priced advertising. In this highly competitive category, price is the main driver of share. But because they were constantly banging on about their low prices, they found they needed new ways to get cut-through. Especially in the butchery department, where discounted meat was a regular feature.
Idea
New Zealanders' love of meat was re-ignited by a weeklong meat sale, which reaffirmed PAKn’SAVE’s passion for low prices. The sale was called Meat Lovers’ Week. A campaign was created offering New Zealanders the chance to ‘Meet the Meat of Your Dreams… For Less’. Radio ads featured lonely cuts of meat looking for hungry mouths to come and buy them. The ‘blind date’ style ads had a ‘call me now’ freephone number call to action. On the other end of the line, there was a surprise for callers. Actors playing the parts of the lonely meats. In what was surely a world first, callers could chat live with lonely meat.
Results
Who would want to talk to a piece of meat? Over ten thousand people as it turned out. Word of the lonely, yet chatty cuts of meat quickly spread and radio DJ’s fuelled the craze by talking to Charlie Chop live on air. The phone lines were flooded and after thousands of conversations, hours of meat jokes, and enough innuendo to kill a cow, the results back from the stores. Meat sales for the week were up a huge 14% which made Meat Lovers’ Week a hearty success.
Our Thoughts
This idea is so completely mental it’s wonderful. How many creative directors would have rejected it as embarrassing, student-y, stupid? How many clients would have done the same? It is generally agreed that most advertising is completely unnoticed. That is because most advertising is utterly predictable and boring. When a piece of meat starts broadcasting, however, that is something different and the first hurdle of advertising has been cleared – simply getting beyond people’s total indifference. What I love about this is it uses the second most despised medium (Radio. Direct Mail is the first.) to get people laughing all the way to the check-out till.