Watch above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
Hey everybody. It’s Steve and Matt back again. You found another one. I actually don’t want to talk too much about it because it is a fairly powerful message campaign, and I love what they did here. So I don’t want to talk about it more. Let’s play this.

 

Singer:
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No, not just for some but for everyone
Lord, we don’t need another mountain
There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb
There are oceans and rivers enough to cross
Enough to last till the end of time
Group Singing:
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
Singer:
No, not just for some but for everyone
Group Singing:
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Wow. It’s a grocery store. It’s a grocery store, and you’re feeling this emotional attachment to it. But here’s what makes these ads really powerful. And we often talk about this idea of the frame of mind of the customer and the aspirations of the customer. Here’s the thing. Studies have shown that there’s a loneliness pandemic in the world today. Studies show it. We’re sitting next to each other on our phones, and you feel that.

You connect with that at the beginning of the commercial, that feeling. Yes, we all feel it. That’s our frame of mind. But then they very quickly pivot to, wouldn’t it be great? Wouldn’t we all love to have this moment where we’re all coming together and sharing this experience and feeling connected with the world around us? And what better way to do that than to break bread together? Think about it.

That’s a worldwide expression, breaking bread together. And they even use bread in one of the ads where the… I’m not sure which one we’re showing, but where the gentleman comes out with a stick of bread. I mean, and suddenly these people are now friends and know each other and have this shared experience together because they did this thing around food. The frame of mind of the moment, and the aspiration that we all want, and it all happens through food. And this is a grocery store. I was like, magical, man. Magical.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. No, I loved a lot about what the director did who was putting this together, who was watching and making sure that we got the right emotion. Disappointment, the frustration, the angst, the like, “Does anybody want to be present?” The feeling on the lady’s face is just brilliant to me. We know nothing. All we know is we could be thinking, “Oh, it’s an electronics ad. It’s all about cell phones. It’s all about… ” We’ve done ads on suicide prevention. There could be a whole bunch of things here that it could be. And like you said, they quickly transitioned into, “But wait a second, wouldn’t it be nice if all we did was get them distracted?” See the world differently…

Stephen Semple:
And connect with our neighbors, right?

Matthew Burns:
Correct.

Stephen Semple:
If I were going to give one criticism of this campaign, they didn’t run it long enough. They ran it for a short period of time. They’ve run it around Thanksgiving, and they’ve run it around Christmas. You would’ve run this longer to really drive this idea home. And I get why, because it’s hard to trace it back to, because what are we selling and everything else? But man, they need to lean into it heavily, and they need to run it longer.

Matthew Burns:
I think that’s a problem with some larger organizations because they’re really into attribution. Do you know what I mean? They micromanage the numbers, and they don’t realize, “Hey, wait a second, a bump is a bump.” We’ve had lots of examples of running a campaign for as long as it’s working, as opposed to just running it for what you think it’s going to be good for. Again, around Thanksgiving and Christmas makes sense because that’s when people buy food to share with family, except that’s the obvious one. What about running it in the middle of the spring? Do you know what I mean?

Stephen Semple:
Well, and when we think about it, there’s only a limited number of emotions that we use for buying. And one of the buying emotions is aspirational. That is an aspirational ad around groceries. Oh my God. It was a very powerful ad that I wish they had run longer, but it’s that whole idea. It’s the frame of mind of the customer. Loneliness. What’s the aspiration they want to have? Connection with their neighbors. How can we do that? Through food. That’s the thing that you do.

So I just wanted to share that ad. So I thought it was a really brilliant, amazing ad for Loblaws. I believe it worked for them. They should have run the campaign longer, and there’s a whole pile of other examples along this same idea. But I just thought that one was very special.

Matthew Burns:
And it’s funny. I know we ran the shorter one, but there’s a longer version of it. It’s like two and a half minutes. It’s some crazy long amount of time. And it had 150,000 views for a two and a half minute ad.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And the longer ones tend to have fewer views. So yeah.

Matthew Burns:
Right. People are craving this right now, and yet we’re not talking about it enough.

Stephen Semple:
Correct. Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. No, I think this one’s great. I’m going to put one at the end here just so people can see that it was a campaign. And because I think, as you said, they should have run longer. This was brilliant.

Stephen Semple:
Right. But it’s that whole idea of how you take the negative frame of mind, transform it into hope and aspiration. This creates those positive feelings, which makes people feel good about Loblaws.

Matthew Burns:
You got it. Make people feel things, people. Make them feel something. They’ll remember you. Go, “Hey, you should buy from us. We’re on sale.” This is awesome. Okay. Well, this is good. I really like this one.

Steve, thank you. This was interesting. And I kind of wish that Loblaws. Loblaws, call us. You already have the goods. [Laughter] We’ll just give you the advice, and you can pay us. We’ll take that too. Anyway, we’ll talk to everybody next time.

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