Also in this report:

– Campbell Soup legacy going strong p.34

– Steady as she goes: Campbell holds line on repositioning, broadens category through production innovation and segmentation p.34

– Campbell’s creative comes full circle: ‘remarkable consistency’ in advertising of warm and fuzzy brand p.35

– Quebec remains a tough territory: ‘It’s a historical matter,’ says one former executive p.39

In 1899, two years after it invented condensed soup, the Campbell Soup Company of Camden, n.j., commissioned its first advertising campaign for the product, buying card advertisements on one-third of the streetcar fleet in New York City.

By the end of that first year of advertising, the campaign had been extended to include every streetcar in the city. The advertising budget for the year was $20,000.

Within five years, Campbell’s Soups were being advertised – with the slogan ‘Look for the Red and White label’ – on 35,000 streetcar cards in almost 400 cities and towns across America. A new star in the American – and in time international – brand firmament was born.

By 1914, magazines had taken over as Campbell’s advertising medium of choice, with streetcar cards still being used in only a few major cities. Newspaper advertising had been used for a short period, but it was dropped for being too expensive and ineffective.

In 1931, Campbell opened its first plant in Canada and began buying advertising space in Canadian magazines. Among the first Canadian publications to carry Campbell’s Soup ads were Chatelaine and Canadian Home Journal.

Magazine advertising continued to be the almost exclusive advertising medium used by Campbell, until the 1930s, when radio proved to be an effective way of reaching a mass audience.

Not surprisingly, in the early days of radio, Canadian listeners got a heavy dose of American programming, either directly from u.s. border stations or via Canadian affiliates of u.s. networks. Thus, American-owned companies like Campbell could rely on their parent organizations to handle their radio advertising needs by sponsoring programs such as The Burns and Allen Show and Amos `n’ Andy.

R.J. Galloway, who began working for Campbell Soup Company in Toronto in 1949 and who retired 40 years later as vice-president of advertising and marketing services, says radio advertising continued to be used extensively until the 1950s, when television burst onto the scene.

One of the first Canadian advertisers to turn to tv, the soup maker’s first sponsored program was a Canadian version of Howdy Doody, which was produced by Campbell at the cbc studio on Jarvis Street in Toronto. The company was also a spot advertiser on a number of other shows.

Galloway says that while tv supplanted radio advertising in the 1950s and early 1960s, ‘we came back strongly into radio in the late 1960s and early 1970s because it made new reach available to us.’

A preferred medium from the 1940s right up to the late 1970s were the rotogravure-printed weekend magazine supplements that appeared in many Canadian newspapers.

Jerry Young, a former Campbell marketing executive who later went on to become ceo of Borden Foods Canada, says the fact that Campbell was a ’52-week advertiser’ in Weekend magazine, The Star Weekly, and Perspectives in Quebec, gave the company a lot of clout with those publications.

In fact, the company’s desires held such sway that it had little trouble securing the coveted ‘Campbell’s position’ for its ads. Decreed by John Dorrance, the inventor of condensed soups, the specification stated that all magazine ads for the company must appear ‘following solid text, on a right-hand page facing a full page of text.’

‘It was the one thing that came to us from the u.s. that was steadfastly executed and not negotiable,’ says Young. ‘God help you if you ran an ad that didn’t meet the criteria.’

Ann Boden, who was a media buyer with Ogilvy & Mather in the 1970s and is now president of Campbell’s current media buying agency, McKim Media Group, remembers the Campbell’s position requirement. She also recalls that Campbell had very strict criteria about the content of the television shows in which it ran its commercials.

‘They were always concerned about their image and the type of shows Campbell’s Soup should appear with,’ she explains. ‘When shows like Three’s Company came out with lots of sexual innuendo, or if a show had excessive violence in it, Campbell didn’t want to be associated with them. They wanted to be in good, family-type programs.’

By the mid-1980s, the company had begun to leverage the heritage of its Red and White brand by focusing on the ’emotional’ aspects of eating soup, according to CTV Television Network President John Cassaday, a former ceo of Campbell’s Canadian operation. Cassaday says the strategy was instrumental in raising Campbell’s share of the canned soup market in Canada by several percentage points.

An important part of that strategy was the implementation of an outdoor campaign that centred on an award-winning creative concept pitched by Ogilvy & Mather.

Simple in design, it depicted a ball of wool shaped like a can of Campbell’s Soup, with a pair of knitting needles stuck through it. The tag line read, simply, ‘Better than a sweater.’

Cassaday, who approved the campaign when he was in charge of marketing and sales, characterizes it as the most ground-breaking marketing initiative he has ever been involved with.

‘Different media can deliver for you on a number of different fronts, but everything really comes down to the quality of the execution,’ says Cassaday. ‘The execution on this campaign was so superb that it became a major part of our media plan for a couple of years.’

Although the campaign was considered an unqualified success, Campbell has used very little outdoor media since the campaign concluded in 1987.

Virtually no radio has been used since 1994.

‘We have used some outdoor and some radio in the past, but right now our primary focus is television,’ says Paul Brennan, senior brand manager for the Red and White label. ‘Plus, print is still consistently and successfully used to support our recipe initiatives. We buy space in essentially all the women’s magazines, from the beginning of the `soup season’ in September through to its end in the March-April period.’

‘We do use some in-store materials, but where we can, we like to concentrate our efforts on the trade rather than on the consumer side of retail. We don’t really feel the need to do a lot of in-store marketing or fsis.’