You Can Call Me Al
These are wackball times, Tuna Johnson. But that’s when you need to get bold and resourceful. Break through the clutter when everybody else is pulling back. Have some fun, do something different, veer off the track. That’s what people are desperate for.
Years ago, a client of ours called Al’s Beverage Company wanted to create a new brand. It wasn’t the first or last time we’d been tasked with building a national brand on a local budget. Ay-yi-yi, we knew it was going to take the art of persuasion to pull this off.
As Buck Norman says, the ad game is about storytelling. So here’s the story we spun for this one.
Leon, Ron, and Bernie, three of Al’s top beverage makers, grabbed me one morning and asked me to tell the goddamn boss to get better coffee. They said the stuff they were drinking tasted like it came from a sewage treatment plant. So I pulled Joe Sibilia, the boss man, aside and said, “Let’s have these three birds come up with their own coffee. That’ll be the new brand.”
So we sent Leon, Ron, and Bernie to Baronet Coffee In Connecticut. For weeks and weeks, they roasted, tested, and developed their own blend of the strongest coffee in the U.S. of A. We called it Al’s Daily Grind—Industrial Strength Coffee. And we built the brand around the slogan, “We were sick and tired of the coffee down at the plant, so we came up with our own.”
Then the no-budget art of persuasion part kicked in. We knew snowboarders and skateboarders would connect with this product and the guys’ “do it yourself” mentality. And we knew these audiences and their influence on trends could groundswell it up to the mainstream. So we talked skate and snowboarding magazines like Thrasher and TransWorld into running Al’s Daily Grind ads in a trade deal for coffee. Same deal with Dickie’s and Rossignol Snowboards who both spread the word in exchange for free beans. Somehow David Letterman heard about the coffee and ordered it for his show and home. He even invited Leon, Ron, and Bernie down to the Ed Sullivan Theater.
The three guys were fun to work with and they were the real deal. Bernie rode into work on a Harley and drank 18 cups of coffee a day—and one before bed so he’d sleep better. Son of a biscuit. So what I’m getting at is this: When times are backward, push forward, baby.
Keep your dukes up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq-gYOrU8bA
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