Bernard Matthews has announced that it is on the hunt for a creative agency after announcing that it plans a new advertising campaign this autumn. Their last campaign ran in 2007 as an attempt to win back customers following the bird flu crisis earlier that year.
Naturally this news has us idly wondering how we’d go about adding an experiential edge to what is, most likely, going to be an entirely print and visual media based campaign.
Now, a travelling roadshow built around turkeys seems to be an amusing idea…but in general is unlikely to serve any real purpose, so we took that off the board fairly quickly. However, this kind of campaign lends itself to some form of experiential work.
We thought that a major selling point for turkey – particularly now, with a burgeoning national interest in health and fitness and a rather vocal media on the subject of childhood obesity – is the fact that it is an incredibly healthy white meat. For those of you that don’t know, it contains comparable amounts of protein to chicken (the healthy meat of choice for most) but a great deal less fat.
This, of course, opens up the consumer market into two specific target areas – parents buying healthy food for their children and adults who are keen on healthy low fat food to aid their lifestyle.
With that in mind an approach that offered the chance to communicate turkey’s healthy nature as well as demonstrating its flexibility as a recipe staple (for some reason it’s only ever associated with roasting and sandwiches…) would be optimum.
This kind of activity could be run as a street-level campaign allowing consumers to taste turkey recipes as well as ask questions and receive face-to-face information on turkey as a healthy food. This could, for added emphasis, be run in tandem with a free and fun health check.
On another front we would look to partnerships with health and fitness companies and brands and even into sponsoring or running a nationwide children’s sporting competition…something promoting teamwork, fun and, above all, healthy living would be most appropriate.
Of course, if there had to be any truly guerrilla activity you can bet it would feature a hundred or so men in turkey suits and running shoes jogging through the city centre to make a healthy point…
More next week.