Anomaly recently launched two broadcast spots for its “Keep on Sucking!” campaign for Hershey’s Jolly Rancher brand, which is aimed at the 18-24 crowd.
The campaign promotes the brand as a means of dealing with all the everyday things that suck, as exemplified by the duo of 15-second broadcast spots which take a look at two such sucktacular items: internships and the middle seat. “Internships Suck,” announces the voiceover in the spot of the same name, before adding that they “suck more with Jolly Rancher” as the intern in question gets ink all over herself and is fired (who bothers firing someone from an internship?). “Middle Seat Sucks,” meanwhile examines the relatable discomfort of squeezing into the middle seat. Both spots pun on the word “suck” as enjoying Jolly Rancher makes the everyday stresses more manageable but “suck more” since this is a hard candy we’re talking about.
There are also a pair of pre-roll ads: “Dive” and “Basketball.” These 15-second efforts drop the suck puns for animated renditions of Jolly Rancher flavors. The characters also appear across the brand’s social channels, where the agency has also been busy identifying things people are complaining about and whipping up visual renditions for the “Keep on Sucking!” campaign, thus far producing 490 pieces of content.
“Just as the candy is hard, life is also hard,”Anomaly copywriter Johnny Dantonio told Adweek. “And the same way you suck on the candy to enjoy that long-lasting flavor, you’re going to have to get through some sucky scenarios in life. It was something we all nodded and chuckled at. So, we ran with it.”
Regarding the social element, which he regards as the “heartbeat” of the campaign, Dantonio added, “If someone is at the Yankees game and says, ‘This rain delay sucks,’ and tweets that, we have the ability to literally tap our illustrator on the shoulder and say, ‘Draw a character sitting at a Yankees game in the rain,’ and tweet it back to them, and say, ‘Hey, just keep on sucking! Have a long-lasting Jolly Rancher.'”