Published on
July 8, 2024
.png)
Welcome to the Breakdown, a weekly roundup of the best real-life marketing examples, created for marketers and agency folk that want to create work that actually works.
Briefly is available to everyone - and all of these campaigns are live in Inspo, our own AI-powered case-study finder that adds some flair to every brief. Sign up to try it out.
In this Breakdown, we're looking at ✨ trends ✨ - when marketers and agency folk decide to look at the outside world, find a new shiny thing, and make an ad about it.
Yes, this campaign is a bit old by now. Sue me.
I wanted to include it in an earlier edition of the Breakdown, but KFC kept coming up with more stuff. Then I forgot about it. But now it’s here.
Honestly, this campaign is so weird. I cannot work out why KFC and Mother went down this route. Yes, the world is in an unparalleled level of confusion, where we cannot be sure what is real or not to a degree that is truly terrifying. AI and fake news have ensured that every screen we see might be displaying something that is neither fiction nor real, but some horrifying, pareidolic, simulacrul amalgam of the two.
What the cluck does that have to do with chicken???
Nothing, really. But these fears are trends by themselves. They’re dark ones. They aren’t really spread across social media themselves, but they are the human responses to the stuff that does spread. I guess they are sort-of on social media as well - in the same way that variants of the phrase “In these difficult times” became a bit of a meme during the pandemic. They’re catchy and sticky and, with the right eye, a bit funny.
The work doesn’t worry too much about being trendy. It catches on to these feelings, and then rides out through a bizarre campaign. The TV ad is an absurd dystopian comedy, and the OOH keeps pace. It’s all quality stuff, really well-made and with a lot of care and craft.
KFC are asking us to “believe in chicken”.
Did we not believe in chicken before?
Does chicken have the answers we all need?
No.
But the work really gets your attention, doesn’t it?
What is the point of going trend-spotting if not to achieve that?
Yeah whatever, I spend loads of time online, it’s just a phase Mum.
Heinz have created a special new kind of sauce - the Every Sauce. It combines almost every one of their sauces into one bottle, and, surprise surprise, you can’t even buy it.
You can win it. The sauce-obsessed, or “obsauced” as the brand call them, can apply online to win one of 100 bottles of this stuff. So, safe to say this bit of NPD isn’t meant to be a profit-driver.
Instead, I think this is a fairly late capitalization on a trend that has been rocking around FoodTok (and before that, food content on YouTube, and before that, actual restaurants). And it started, I think, with McDonald’s and their special sauce.
Mixing together a bunch of sauces to make a new, uber-sauce is a trick as old as time. McDonald’s burger sauce is some kind of mix of mayo, mustard, sweet relish, and maybe ketchup. Classic burger sauce is just the mayo, mustard and ketchup. If you’re Heinz, seeing this recipe appear more and more on social media must have been bliss - people are buying 3 bottles of sauce to make one sauce? Heaven.
Since then, the practice of mixing sauces has become incredibly commonplace - there was a point where we could barely move for sriracha mayo. And so, I think that this one-off Every Sauce is a bit of recognition for this ‘trend’. And maybe to fan the flames a bit - it looks like the sauce world has started to trend towards fermented hot sauces.
I quite like the idea of flying under a trend radar. Letting it happen, rather than trying to jam your brand in the middle of it. Maybe I like it because, as a Brit, nothing is more satisfying than well-executed subtlety. I am quite interested in what triggered this bit of work though.
I’ve made a lot of guesses and assumptions here - please do correct me if you can.
Unless you want to correct me on how you think burger sauce should be made.
Then you can shove it.
And it’s working.
Blank Street Coffee are themselves a bit of a trend. Springing up from a single cart in New York back in 2020, the chain has opened more than 40 locations in the Big Apple and a couple handfuls in London in the past 4 years.
And recently, they’ve been doing some marketing. They got Sabrina Carpenter to work in a coffee shop, following her hit song ‘Espresso’ going viral on TikTok. And more recently, they opened a pop-up matcha stall next to a padel court in Battersea, London.
Literally all of these words are 'trendy’ things.
I’m going to breeze past the issue I have with the Sabrina Carpenter influencer work (which is that getting a very rich and famous person to cosplay as a regular, working person for a day feels a little… icky). Instead, let’s focus on the new work - the padel and matcha pop-up.
The marketing director at Blank Street, Claudia Winter, said
"We looked at data from Google Trends and saw that searches for ‘matcha’ have more than doubled in the last year, whilst searches for ‘padel’ have tripled. As for TikTok, hashtag #Padel has amassed 5.3 billion views on the platform, and hashtag #matcha tops it with an impressive 10.3 billion."
I mean, I think you could have landed at padel without checking Google Trends, especially with Wimbledon on right now. And if you’re a coffee brand, staying on top of coffee trends seems imperative. But how they got there isn’t that important.
The activation itself is incredibly well-branded. The chain’s sea-foam green is everywhere. Some care and attention has gone into ordering custom racquets and balls and t-shirts. It all looks just a bit nice, doesn’t it.
This is how you do a trend without ‘doing a trend’. This isn’t a bad recreation of a TikTok dance. This is shamelessly accepting that something is incredibly popular, so we’ll insert ourselves and make it worth people’s time with some cool stuff that we’ve made. I don’t like matcha-based drinks and I don’t like padel (actual tennis only, please). But I still want one of these t-shirts.