CAMPAIGN TYPE: Marketing Communications
TIMEFRAME: December 2003 - January 2004
BUDGET: $30,000
Talk about chicken hawks.
Gazebo Room Salad Dressing and Marinade (Mechanicsburg, Penn.), a 50-year-old regional brand that's sold in 13 states around the Atlantic seaboard as well as Texas,
wanted to convince consumers that Gazebo Room could be used as a salad dressing and marinade. The brand is one of the most popular toppings for barbeque chicken and similar fare,
but was facing paltry growth and needed to boost sales.
"Being a small company, the challenge is always financial. Getting the most bang for your buck for any promotion, whether it's the chickens or Free Standing Inserts (FSIs) or
end-cap displays is our primary concern," says Nick Gekas, president of Best Dressed Associates, which produces Gazebo Room Dressing. "Most of the products we're competing
with (such as Newman's Own), have multimillion-dollar promotional budgets, which we obviously don't have."
Gazebo asked its PR agency, Pavone, to create a program that would get existing customers to think differently about the brand and whet the appetites of some new ones.
Using a strategy of humor and reverse psychology, Pavone invented a fictitious cause - The Cluck Council - composed entirely of "protesting" chickens upset that their brethren
were being marinated in Gazebo Room dressing.
Twenty actors were hired, dressed in full-body chicken suits and set loose in planned appearances with placards reading, "Dress the Salad, Not the Chicken!" The hens blanketed
Pennsylvania in December 2003 and January 2004 with a series of uprisings and protests aimed at preventing - yet inadvertently promoting - the use of Gazebo Room as a marinade and
salad dressing. Pavone also set up a Web site, madchickens.com, with a link that says, "Please don't visit GazeboRoom.com."
The idea was designed to confuse yet simultaneously entertain consumers. "We made it clear that this was all in good, clean fun," says Paul Murray, creative director and
partner at Pavone, a full service global PR firm based in Harrisburg, Penn. "We presented the [chickens] in such a way that people would not think these were real protests."
Gazebo kicked off the campaign with a mock press conference in Harrisburg, the state capitol, in which the chickens and their lawyer "Seymour J. McGillicuddy" stated their
cause, handing out press kits with leadership bios, letterheads and fistfuls of stray feathers. "This was not a 'bright' crowd," Murray says. During the press conference, for
example, Mr. McGillicuddy decried the use Gazebo Room as a marinade while at the same time savoring a piece of chicken topped with - you guessed it - Gazebo Room dressing. To add
to the realism, Pavone staff posed as reporters, interfacing with real media reps.
In the weeks following the press conference Pavone staffers drove around chickens in convertibles during lunch hours. They also conducted a guerilla PR blitz of chicken
sighting calls to radio stations and wrote letters to the editors of local newspapers in response to the Cluck Council campaign.
The chickens and their counsel also invaded the Pennsylvania Farm Show -- the largest farm show in the country - where the chickens staged a "cluck-in" at the Gazebo Room
sampling booth while disseminating 10,000 anti-coupons reading, "Do Not Use This Coupon - At least not to make delicious grilled chicken." The chickens moved so much traffic to
Gazebo's tasting booth that Gazebo had to temporarily halt sales to restock. "Placing the chickens [and Gazebo] at the Farm Show was a good match," says Samantha Elliott, a PR
strategist at Pavone who worked on the campaign. Indeed, the "anti-coupons" distributed generated a 12% redemption rate whereas the industry-wide rate for Free Standing Inserts
is in the 1% to 2% range.
The chickens also showed up (unannounced) to a Guinness World Records event for longest 'Chicken Dance'. At first, police officers at the event thought the "protest" was
serious but after the chickens explained to them what was going on, the mood lightened up and the chickens ended up boogying with reporters from local network affiliates.
The campaign was picked up 12 times by local news programs on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC; it also got exposure from four newspapers features, including
two in central Pennsylvania's largest daily, The Patriot-News. According to Pavone, the publicity generated a PR value of more than $60,000 - twice the client's initial budget.
(The Web site generated more than 8,000 Web hits in a single week and more than 6,000 in a single day.)
Concerned that the chickens might be getting too overexposed they've been sent back to the farm for now, but plan to pop up again as the summer barbeque season approaches.