By Adam R Jacobson
RBR + TVBR
MARINA DEL REY, CALIF. — I love donuts.
Maybe I should be Canadian, since Tim Horton and I would be best buddies.
My favorite spot on Abbot Kinney is not Tasting Room, or Gjelina, or Intelligentsia
It’s Blue Star Donuts, imported with love from Portlandia.
That’s why a viral campaign from Krispy Kreme caught my attention.
They just did something real cool.
It’s something Radio could easily pull off … if only someone could create a truly captivating radio spot anymore.
Here’s the set up:
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts had a new variety of deliciousness it wished to promote.
In the spirit of the late Bill Gates, and the splashy Apple product launch announcement style the company he found became famous, the donut created a :30 that parodies Apple.
With an opening scene promising “a special announcement from Krispy Kreme,” actor Brian LaFontaine — here, a dead ringer for Apple CEO Tim Cook — enters a very Apple-like product launch setting.
With pomp and bravado, the actor makes the following announcement:
We have a new doughnut. It has Nutella on it.
The actor then walks off the stage as a slide features the Nutty Cocoa Ring, topped with Nutella, variety.
There’s a hashtag, of course, for the campaign: #EasiestSellEver.
The genius behind this spot is North Carolina-based agency Baldwin&.
They also handled the media buy.
This is where I sigh.
This was an all-digital effort, with skippable :30 pre-rolls, YouTube six-second bumper ads, banner ads, and that lovely thing we like to call native advertising.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google Adwords were involved in the buy.
Maybe I should frequent KK less and go runnin’ on Duncan.
OK, maybe TV is a bit above your budget. But c’mon … imagine the fun and possibilities with a radio campaign.
The audio from this alone, with a radio commentator not unlike someone from NPR, would make a brilliant :30 or even a :60.
Radio and digital spots combined could have made this an even bigger viral effort … with actual ROI that matters.
Think of the wrap-around efforts: Donut parties at a winning office; “Krispy Themes” offered by Brooke & Jubal, or Roula & Ryan, or The Woody Show, or …
You get what I’m sayin’, but why didn’t Baldwin&?
Because we are not creative.
Or radio spots suck. They are after-thoughts that lack emotion or that “grab me now” pull of yesteryear.
And, we offer them to listeners in eight-minute pods.
Worse yet, we delete them from our streams (cough-cough, CBS Radio — you guys have the most g-d awful streams in America) and replace them with even worse crap.
Kars 4 Kids?
Yeah …. no wonder why Krispy Kreme did not take the 15 minutes it took me to write this column to even consider radio.
If radio truly is the original “social media,” then let’s refresh our creative to make it as cool and fun and inviting as what is going online … to a smaller cume.
