Blizzard ads whip up storm of sales
Updated 8/27/2006 11:13 PM ET
By Theresa Howard, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — A passenger enters an airline cabin with a beverage and carry-on luggage in hand. He sets down the drink to pack his carry-on bag into an overhead storage bin.
He tries to store the bag without disrupting fellow fliers in those few stressful moments before take-off.
It used to be a familiar scene for air travelers — under the latest round of air travel security restrictions, the drink and probably the bag would be banned — and was the crux of a recent ad for Dairy Queen's Caramel Chip CheeseQuake Blizzard.
The ad is now off the air, but not before it helped boost Blizzard sales this summer. In turn, strong Blizzard sales have helped boost sales at stores open at least a year — a measure of retail success known as same-store sales — up 4% year-to-date for the 5,600-store chain.
Summer is the peak selling season for the chain and for its Blizzard drink product, DQ top-sellers with annual sales of $750 million. That's a big chunk of change for a chain whose total sales are $3 billion annually.
DQ has been focusing more on its full-menu offerings, offered at two-thirds of its stores, but the bulk of its $80 million to $100 million in annual ad spending still goes toward dairy treats, especially Blizzard varieties.
Ads this summer promoted the Caramel Chip CheeseQuake Blizzard and Monster Cookie Blizzard.
The Monster Cookie ad shows a father and son enjoying a treat, until the son asks his Dad where Monster Cookies come from. The father then crafts a bizarre tale of cookie-making monsters flirting over a bin of green M&Ms, believed in urban legend to have aphrodisiac power.
"For both of the ads, we spent a lot of time coming up with ideas that connect simple truths about customer lives," says Michael Keller, DQ's chief brand manager. The company and its ad agency, Grey Worldwide, develop 15 to 20 ads annually. It's no treat coming up with all those ideas for the ads. And it's not easy hitting the Blizzard flavor combination, either, says Keller.
"It's a lot of hard work," he says. For the ads, "there's a lot of detail. And for any two or three Blizzards that hit the marketing calendar, we've probably started out with 50 to 100 ideas. We whittle them down to those varieties that would be most exciting to consumers and those that would be most successful in test markets."
This summer's Blizzard concoctions and the ads that touted them were a huge hit with consumers surveyed by Ad Track, USA TODAY's exclusive weekly poll. Of those familiar with the ads, 36% like them "a lot," compared with the Ad Track average of 21%. That's the second-highest result in Ad Track this year, trailing a Windex ad by only one percentage point.
(That commercial shows wisecracking birds who pull a prank on a homeowner by closing sliding glass doors. He walks right into them because they're so clean, he doesn't realized they're closed.)
The DQ ads' success is, in part, because Dairy Queen's limited ad budget means only the very best work makes the cut, says Jonathan Rodgers, deputy chief creative officer at Grey. "We have to work a little harder on each spot. We have more modest budgets than our competitors. We can't really afford to show a spot that doesn't break through."
Neither can DQ offer a flavor that doesn't break through. That's why one pending flavor, Nacho Cheese Blizzard, may never make it onto menu boards. That's the flavor developed by DQ's own "apprentice" Jackie Preston. She appeared in the CheeseQuake Blizzard ad and won a trip to DQ headquarters to help develop a new Blizzard flavor after getting the most votes for her essay and video about Blizzards at DQ's Blizzard fan-club website. |
