MEDIA snapshot
Name: Sue Alexander Ash
Position: VP/MD, The Media Company, Toronto
Hometown: Toronto
Fave snack: popcorn, not chips
Fave flavour: sour cream & onion
Professional turn-on: innovation and creativity in media plans that are strategically relevant for the brand and the target consumer
MEDIA snapshot
Name: Debbie Hoover
Position: account director, The Media Company, Toronto
Hometown: Winnipeg
Popcorn history: used to eat popcorn as an entire meal while working at a cinema during high school
Fave flavour: lots of butter
Key to pulling off ‘Orville Time’: bribing the traffic people with lots of free popcorn because they’re dealing with a nightmare
You know the Pavlovian response that compels folks to follow their noses to the microwave whenever they smell freshly popped popcorn? Hold that thought. Now, for those in the Toronto area, do you remember those Buffalo News messages that used to come on TV every night saying: ‘It’s 11 o’clock, do you know where your children are?’
Got it? Well, smoosh the two elements together and you have the genesis of what can only be called a pioneering concept concocted during a day-long brainstorming blitz about innovative ways to promote Orville Redenbacher popcorn.
The idea was a humdinger whose only drawback was that it seemed undoable, says Sue Alexander Ash, VP/MD at Toronto’s The Media Company, who participated in the session along with her account director, Debbie Hoover, client reps and creatives from Toronto’s Draft Worldwide.
‘We thought, wouldn’t it be fabulous if we could actually own a specific time on the TV schedule – ideally 9 p.m. because that’s when the dishes are done, the kids are in bed and the parents relax – and brand it as Orville snack time?
‘We talked about whether we really needed a 15- or 30-second sell to do that and the answer was no. All we really needed was to build frequency in logo and brand recognition with an ultra-simple message because everyone instantly ‘gets’ popcorn. That’s when we realized that all it would take is a five-second spot, appearing at the exact same time every night, saying something like, ‘It’s 9:00. It’s Orville time.”
Brilliant. But the problem, says Hoover, was that such brevity was unheard of for anything other than sponsorship announcements accompanied by full-length commercials within a program. Not only that, but CRTC licenses don’t provide for five-second spots.
Nevertheless, when Ash and Hoover sat down with CanWest Global account exec Christopher Hedges, they came up with a solution: simply extend the spots to seven seconds by tacking station promos on at the end.
The result of the exercise, which is simplicity itself, began running on Global and CH channels in five major markets (Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal) last fall, with all spots running as close to 9 p.m. on the dot as inventory availability allows.
There are two executions, each beginning with a black screen. Then ‘9:00’ appears bottom right. One spot resembles the digital read-out on a microwave oven and the other replaces the zeroes in 9:00 with corn kernels. In one version, the screen simply fills with exploding popcorn. In the other, a bag of popcorn is seen inside a microwave. It suddenly splits and spills out popcorn. In both versions, a second screen then appears with a large Orville Redenbacher logo and a station promo along the lines of: ‘We invite you to watch this CH program.’
‘The only thing that could make it better,’ quips Ash, ‘is if we could actually add smell-o-vision.’
Even without that redolent marvel, the ‘Orville Time’ campaign is a stand-out media buy that uses frequency and synchronicity as a subliminal seduction technique to train consumers to associate watching TV at a particular time with snacking on a specific product. And all this at a cost Ash declines to disclose, but estimates at ‘extending the time we’re buying, versus 15- or 30-second spots, by probably 3 to 1.’
No wonder rumour has it that the Orville team at the U.S. HQ of parent company ConAgra Grocery Products is considering following suit down south.
