20 Aug Quick Pitch: Quaker Oats
For a quick exercise on coming up with a concept for advertising a product, I did a quick web search and found this (almost certainly fake) creative brief for Quaker Oats, which was a fun jumping off point.
The problem:
Most people believe eating breakfast is important (93%), but most decide to skip it anyway. There’s no time for breakfast. Quaker Oats needs to convince people to eat breakfast, and more specifically, to eat oatmeal.
There’s a lot of good stuff to work with here, so I wrote a bunch of notes, ate a big heaping pile of oatmeal, and got to work.
There are two main concepts here to work with, the first one will assume this is a pre-COVID brief, with conventional morning advertising (mass transit, billboard), the other will move the brief slightly, to assume that people now have the time to make Quaker Oatmeal, and it will improve their AM well-being to take the time to make some oatmeal. The idea that someone doesn’t have enough time to eat breakfast is something that will never go away, people will always feel like time is slipping away from them, but the things that are occupying their time are of a different nature.
These campaigns will be linked similarly, in that they will both rely on two things:
Brand Recognition (Quaker Man):
The Quaker Oats mascot is, and I don’t say this lightly, iconic. The man is a legend. So we’re going to use him (or more appropriately, his outfit) to indicate that somebody made the conscious decision to eat breakfast this morning, and is now better for it. The visual juxtaposition of people dressed normally with a person wearing full Quaker garb is enough to grab the attention of even the grumpiest of morning commuters.
“Instant”:
Honestly, I already associate this word with oatmeal, which is good for our purposes. We’re going to use this word to simultaneously remind people that instant oatmeal exists, and use the word to suggest an instant internal transformation. “From early morning groggy to chipper at the morning meeting in an instant,” but with less words. Hit ’em with the slogan up front, give people some copy to read (dependent on the medium), and we’re good to go.
Slogan pitches:
Better mornings. In an instant.
“Morning person” energy. Instantly.
Instantly better mornings.
Instantly improved mornings.
Mornings just got better.
Better morning meetings. In an instant.
Getting up, improved. Instantly.
Campaign #1: Targeting commuters (Pre-COVID)
Ads in this campaign will target commuters on their way to work, mostly in major American cities with a large differential in daytime/nighttime population, as these are people are most likely to skip breakfast. Spends will include billboards, public transit (bus/rail), etc. This campaign relies on the visual juxtaposition we discussed earlier, so while radio/podcast advertising is tempting here, doesn’t make sense for the campaign.
Advertisements will consist of large photos of people dressed up like Quakers (ruffled shirt, large navy blue hat with a buckle wrapped around it) in various scenes of commuting. So one guy’s riding his bike dressed like a Quaker next to a bunch of people wearing cycling clothes having the time of his life, there’s a woman in full Quaker garb looking ahead contently, grabbing the handrail on public transit while all around her people are looking down at their phones, someone driving their car stuck in traffic dressed like a Quaker, but they don’t seem to mind, as they’ve clearly eaten breakfast. Hit it with a slogan at the bottom, and a Quaker Oats logo at the bottom right. We’re not pitching specific products here, just the idea of eating oatmeal in the morning, we’re just trying to convert them once they get to the grocery store.
Campaign #2: Targeting professionals working from home (2020)
This campaign will feature the same spirit of the first campaign, but instead of commuting, we’ll have the subjects of these commercials doing things you would do in the morning, but in good spirits as a result of having eating breakfast. Walking the dog, virtual morning meetings, doing yoga, all while the subject of the advertisement is wearing a full Quaker outfit. We’d hit it with some of the same slogans above, slap a logo on it, and add about 20 words of body copy depending on the type of magazine.
Variations:
If this campaign were specifically geared towards getting younger people to eat oatmeal to form habits they carry with them the rest of their lives (currently, I would not associate eating oatmeal with “youthfulness”), I would perhaps go a bit edgier, at the risk of alienating an older, more conservative audience. In all of the scenes I described above, instead of having individuals dressed as Quakers, they would instead be wearing large Quaker mascot heads, and those heads would be comically too small for their situation. The idea of this is that the incredible morning you’re having from eating breakfast is ruining other people’s morning commute, but you are blissfully unaware.
In campaign 1 (targeting commuters), the large, oversize mascot heads of the breakfast eating commuters would impose themselves on others that would make others uncomfortable. Picture a crowded subway train, and in the middle, a woman dressed in professional garb with a large Quaker mascot head, while others on the train struggle to move around it. In a bike lane, a man is cycling at a moderate pace while banners and small birds have become caught around his large hat.
Adjusting campaign two would be only minor adjustments as well. While doing yoga, the large hat is starting to scrape against the wall, moving artwork along with it. While sitting at a desk working from home, a cat has gotten on the table and is attempting to swat at the brim of the hat, while the subject appears content, knowing there’s a delicious meal in their stomach.
In conclusion:
Overall, I’m very happy where we ended with this one. Every time I picture someone in full Quaker regalia walking their dog or riding the bus, I can’t help but think its funny. I think it’s pretty conservative in general, but this is oatmeal, not energy drinks. The brief specifically mentioned a lot about coffee, like they’re trying to compete with coffee, but I didn’t focus on that aspect of it too much, as I don’t think coffee and oatmeal are mutually exclusive things. I also didn’t focus too much on the concept of “energy,” which was used a lot in the brief, I just tried to focus on the idea that oatmeal would make mornings “better,” which is only an implied increase in energy. But I think this is a completely viable Quaker Oats campaign.