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Somehow Crispin & Porter is able to convince conservative brands to take a leap of faith and break the mold in the category. This time with a brilliant campaign for Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Not only is it a great multi-media campaign but they have integrated the website with the new approach – as they should but often ignored by traditional brands. Maybe, just maybe, the success they are having with most of their clients will help open the eyes and minds of other marketing directors to kill the milk toast and get real. JT
By STUART ELLIOTT
Published: May 26, 2010
KRAFT FOODS wants grown-ups to get the blues in the night, and in the afternoon and at snack time, too.
To underline that message, the macaroni campaign carries the playful theme, “You know you love it,” and continues in that vein with lines like “The most fun you can have with your stove on,” “Outgrow outgrowing it,” “Imported from your childhood” and “Parents need warm cheesy hugs.”
The campaign will sell the entire Kraft Macaroni and Cheese line, which in addition to the classic blue boxes includes varieties like Deluxe, Easy Mac and Homestyle. The campaign began on Wednesday with a commercial during the ninth-season finale of “American Idol.”
There will also be other television commercials; print ads; billboards; ads online; a Web site, youknowyouloveit.com; a presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter; and even “noodle art” — replicas of macaroni noodles, 20 feet long and 9 feet high — placed in and around landmarks like Fisherman’s Wharf and Wrigley Field.
Kraft executives say they intend to spend more than $50 million this year to promote the macaroni products, an increase of more than 30 percent from last year.
Most of the spending last year was devoted to ads that peddled the product to recession-weary consumers as a good value. For example, the headline of a magazine ad declared: “Small price. Big cheese-eating grin.”
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Kraft is changing pitches as the economy seems to be improving. But consumers are still dining more at home than they did two or three years ago, offering an opportunity for giant purveyors of consumer packaged goods to reintroduce shoppers to pantry staples.
Kraft joins mainstay marketers like Campbell, ConAgra, General Mills, Heinz, Hershey, Hormel, Kellogg and Smucker in increasing ad spending, bringing out new products and restaging old favorites.
Macaroni and cheese joins a lengthening list of Kraft products to benefit from new campaigns, among them Bull’s-Eye barbecue sauce, Chips Ahoy, Oscar Mayer, Miracle Whip and Philadelphia cream cheese.
“There’s no big project corporate-wide that says we must reinvent all these businesses,” said Chris Miles, director of advertising for the grocery business at Kraft in Northfield, Ill., but he says there is a goal of “raising the bar on creativity, taking more risks, be more arresting and engaging, maybe test a little bit less.”
“We’re realizing a lot of our brands have the right to play in a more emotional space than the rational territory we’ve mined in the past,” Mr. Miles said. In other words, fewer descriptions of how macaroni and cheese costs “about a dollar a box,” as one recent ad says, and more efforts to sell it as a fun food for adults who could use some fun in their lives.
“We’re excited about finding avenues of growth to tap into the full potential of the brand,” said Alberto Huerta, senior marketing director for the meals business at Kraft.
“Kids love us, but adults love us, too,” he added, “and there’s a lot of business to be had there.”
In the first commercial, a son suggests that his father had “put me in time out” during dinner so the father could “scarf down” macaroni from the child’s plate.
“Have you had enough?” the son, speaking like a grown-up, asks his father accusingly.
In another spot, a daughter gripes as her mother eats off her plate as if the child were not noticing the theft. “The crime wave continues,” the daughter says in an adult voice.
The creative agency for the campaign is the Boulder, Colo., office of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the MDC Partners agency known for rule-breaking work for marketers like Burger King and Microsoft. Crispin Porter won the macaroni assignment in March from the longtime creative incumbent, DraftFCB in Chicago, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.
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The assignment from Kraft was “to make the brand more of a family food,” said Rob Reilly, partner and chief creative officer at Crispin Porter, reflecting that although “it’s a favorite of kids, it’s not kid food.”
But “the amazing job Kraft did marketing it to kids” meant that “adults felt they couldn’t eat it without feeling they were eating kid food,” Mr. Reilly said. So the campaign will borrow a page from the Frosted Flakes playbook and use humor to “unleash a little bit of permission,” he added, and let adults “say they love it.”
“Sometimes, you’ve just got to enable it,” Mr. Reilly said, “and advertising is a great enabler.”
The other agencies on the campaign are the Chicago office of Landor Associates, part of the Young & Rubicam Brands division of WPP, for new packaging; the Chicago offices of two Publicis Groupe agencies, Digitas and Mediavest, for digital and media planning and buying; and Hunter Public Relations in New York.
