Corn dogs are a food item that some people like to consume.
This is a statement of fact, and we believe it though we have not personally eaten a corn dog since little league. Fried stuff just tastes good, with very few exceptions.
In its latest campaign, Odysseus Arms of San Francisco promotes new client Foster Farms Corn Dogs by positioning the company’s products as the obvious solution to your kid’s hunger needs. Kind of like how those old Snickers ads led us to believe that a candy bar was the perfect thing to eat while we were playing soccer or baseball or ultimate frisbee and didn’t really have time for a meal or a piece of fresh fruit.
The hunger, in this case, is a nicely animated monster.
Wow, that monster commits flagrant fouls! He’s also no match for a canine, though we are pretty sure our dog would get scared and run to us for protection. She is very shy around strangers.
This is the client’s first-ever ad campaign, and Foster Farms marketing director Jon Swadley says, “Launching the first campaign for Foster Farms Corn Dogs was a big undertaking for us. We found a great strategic and creative partner in Odysseus Arms. Their immersive consumer approach in strategic and creative development resulted in creative that was immensely successful in our initial reads. We look forward to putting that success to the test in-market.”
The most interesting part of the release concerns ThirdEye, which is not the ’90s alt rock band you’ll never admit to liking but, rather, a “proprietary creative development approach” that allows the agency to “co-create with consumers to refine strategy and creative assets, and to empirically test, through focus groups and copy testing labs, prospective materials before they hit the market.”
In this case, the Odysseus Arms team “worked alongside busy moms that are buying food for the always-hungry family” in order to better design a campaign tailored to them.
Odysseus Arms co-founder Libby Brockhoff says: “ThirdEye™ started as a proprietary technique I was using to glean insight from an unfamiliar segmentation. Four years later, it’s our model. It shows us what fascinates a consumer before media investment.”
We thought it was a fun ad!