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Mick Torbay:
This was a very big budget operation. There were 25 production trucks. You’d think they were shooting a feature film.

Matthew Burns:
Welcome back to Sticky Sales Stories. Where Stephen and I-

Mick Torbay:
I’m Stephen Semple. [joking]

Matthew Burns:
See, this is-

Mick Torbay:
Nice to see you.

Matthew Burns:
This is Mick Torbay. Mick Torbay was available because, quite frankly, he’s cheap.

Mick Torbay:
And that’s why I’m here. I’m here because I was available. This is who you get. You get someone who had nothing better to do. This is how high Matthew keeps the bar here at Sticky Sales Stories.

Matthew Burns:
Correct. Mick Torbay also has a very interesting nickname. We love to call him Tough Love Torbay. And that’s actually why I reached out to Mick to see if he would come on.

Mick Torbay:
Because he wanted to be yelled at, and that’s what I do.

Matthew Burns:
And he will constantly interrupt me this entire episode. I asked him a very specific question, and he said, “I’ve got a really good…”

Mick Torbay:
And instead of answering it …

Matthew Burns:
Stop it. He gave me a really good example. I wanted him to tell me something that doesn’t work. And he has this belief system that Big Ad, so all of the big marketing agencies are failing right now. Is that fair?

Mick Torbay:
Well, I mean, I think that might be a little harsher. It’s not that they’re failing. They’re obviously doing a great job. It’s not so much that they’re failing. It’s just that they’ve abandoned an aspect of marketing that was so powerful in days of yore. They seem to have simply just walked away from the concept of the campaign in search of one great ad.

When you watch Sticky Sales Stories, generally, the program is talking about campaigns, and the examples they give are almost always from days gone by. The most famous campaign, Mac versus PC, is a great example of one. It went for six, seven years. It was an awesome campaign.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Mick Torbay:
But every ad was telling a story, you had the characters, you were wondering what was going to happen, and then you were looking forward to the next one. It was like, “What’s the next chapter of this story?” The point that I was making with Matthew is that I believe that in the last few years, big multinational agencies seem to be abandoning the campaign idea. Instead, they’re looking for just a great ad.

And I’m wondering why they’re doing that because I mean, certainly at the Wizard of Ads organization, we’re leaning into campaigns. That’s kind of all we do. But you’d think these big agencies would say, “Well, they should be able to do it even better than we can.” They’ve got the resources that we don’t have.

Matthew Burns:
And that’s it. And so we wanted to highlight one specifically because we could give you a little bit of data on it. Mick was able to be on set for a shoot recently for King’s Hawaiian. And if you don’t know who King’s Hawaiian are, they are-

Mick Torbay:
They make buns.

Matthew Burns:
They make buns.

Mick Torbay:
Do you like buns? Oh, by the way, they’re delicious. You should absolutely eat the King’s Hawaiian buns.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, tasty Hawaiian buns and-

Mick Torbay:
Sweet rolls.

Matthew Burns:
What you watched, you were like, “Oh man, look at this character. Look at that character. These are great characters, correct?” Actually, before we do that, let me play the ad.

Mick Torbay:
Play the ad.

Matthew Burns:
Let me play the ad here-

Mick Torbay:
It was shot here in Toronto.

Matthew Burns:
And it was shot in Toronto, but it’s an American company, and the ads ran in the United States. Yeah.

Mick Torbay:
I don’t know if they ran in Canada. They definitely ran in the States.

Matthew Burns:
Watch this 30-second ad.

 

Dad: Kids, come help with the groceries.
Kid 1: [scoffs]
Mom: Oh, we got King’s.
Kid 1: Did somebody say King’s Hawaiian?
Kid 2: I’m making pizza sliders.
Newscaster: Breaking news, the Nelsons got King’s Hawaiian.
Grandpa: How do I make this thing go faster?
Kid 1: Oh man.
Postal Worker: Have you tried their pretzel bites? So good.
Newscaster: This just in – me.
Announcer: King’s Hawaiian. There’s nothing like it.
Neighbor: Did somebody say King’s Hawaiian?

Mick Torbay:
Now I look at that ad, and I think, look at all the interesting characters you’ve got. You got the mom and dad.

Matthew Burns:
No, wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. One second. The monitor’s just bouncing down the stairs.

Mick Torbay:
The exaggeration is awesome. I mean, that’s what comedy is. Comedy is exaggeration. They took it to the next level, which was brilliant. You got the mom and dad characters that they didn’t really explore much with them, but they’re straight people. They’re not the comedy. The comedy comes from the kids who are ridiculous. An exaggeration, the grandfather who’s ridiculous, he’s an exaggeration. You’ve got the guy on TV who’s reacting to them buying buns. That’s an exaggeration. He then shows up at the end, which also doesn’t make sense. It’s fun. You’ve got the dog walking lady, you’ve got the postal worker who sticks her head through the cat door.

Everything about it is interesting. Everyone I talk to says it’s such a great ad, and it is. And I think here was an opportunity where they could turn this into a campaign. The next one could be about the news guy. The third one could be about the dog walking lady, the postal worker, or the grandfather.

Matthew Burns:
Correct.

Mick Torbay:
They’ve got an opportunity to say, “I wonder what’s going to be the next interesting story.” Tying this ragtag group of interesting characters, tie it to the brand, make it fun, and make people want to watch the next one, except that’s not what they’re doing. They’re not doing that at all.

Matthew Burns:
No, correct. And here, the one thing that we believe wholeheartedly is that, and the reason why we call the channel Sticky Sales Stories, is because it needs to be a story of some sort. There needs to be a beginning, a middle, and an end for it to really hit home. I could see this playing out. It’s funny, you said the words, and then I said episodic. It could be almost like a one-minute comedy series. It literally could be like a sitcom-type situation.

Mick Torbay:
A lost opportunity to expand on it. Expand on something that’s really good. I think everyone I’ve shown this to says, “This is a great commercial,” and it is.

Matthew Burns:
And you know what? That’s confirmation bias. I’ll go to YouTube. YouTube has … They made a 30, I can’t remember, a 15, and a seven-second version of this ad.

And the 30-second, the one we showed you, has 50-some odd, almost 60,000 views on YouTube, which means it’s an interesting one-off ad. It’s so interesting that 60,000 people went out of their way to watch it on YouTube because this isn’t an ad that’s been put in other places on YouTube. They went and found it till they could watch it, and they thought it was great. And the retention on the ad was fantastic.

That doubles down on the fact that it’s a lost opportunity. There are people who are resonating with the characters, the idea, and the fun of this ad. Why not double down on that?

Mick Torbay:
And the 15-second version has almost 400,000 views. I think that almost qualifies as viral. I mean, that’s people watching more than once or sending it to their friends and saying, “Hey, you’ve got to see this. It’s awesome.

Matthew Burns:
Correct. And the comments on it. I mean, guys, King’s Hawaiian, look it up, you’ll see. So I know you’ve kind of described this, but how would we fix this? What would we do? Wizard of Ads style? What would we do to this campaign off the top of our heads?

Mick Torbay:
Well, what we would do is we would never have thought of it as a one-off ad because that’s simply not what we deliver to our clients. What we deliver is a long-term plan. By definition, everything we do is a long-term plan. So we would already have story arcs in our head for what the grandfather is going to do? There’s a teenage girl who comes in at the very end. She’s in the frame for half a second. What’s her story?

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Mick Torbay:
Why did she show up? Something you could do is have fun with the postal worker here. Why does she stick her head through the cat door? Next time, she could stick her head over the lintel. Or she could stick her head through the window. She could always arrive in unusual ways.

Matthew Burns:
Grandpa. My favorite one was Grandpa going up the thing.

Mick Torbay:
Grandpa on the stair lift. Well, next time we could find another-

Matthew Burns:
He can’t make his stroller move like his walk and move past.

Mick Torbay:
He could have a walker or something. Yeah. Or he could have a scooter. He could be on a scooter or something. They went to a lot of trouble to give each character interesting and frankly memorable qualities. They cast it very carefully. And it was a-

Matthew Burns:
They all have their own little quirks and things, and you can build on those. But think about the missed opportunity in channel alignment. So think about the social media campaign where each one of those characters has a 10, 15, or 20-second social media piece that shows up randomly on the internet.

Mick Torbay:
Why?

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. Absolutely. You’ve got a whole YouTube campaign that you could run. You’ve obviously got 30-second ads on television that you get. I would say you’d be doing nine of these a year and never repeat them. Keep growing these characters and making them better. Easily see or hear, but in my mind, I go, I can see how a radio ad campaign could have been plugged into all this, where you get soundbites from grandpa, and you get soundbites from the kids. The one kid at the beginning who didn’t even want to help out with groceries, and he’s like …

Mick Torbay:
Bit of a jerkface kid, that one.

Matthew Burns:
A little bit. Yeah. He seems like he probably doesn’t have good parents.

Mick Torbay:
No, he wasn’t raised…

Matthew Burns:
So the parents seem nice in the video.

Mick Torbay:
Yeah. And I was going to say, they seem like such nice parents. You think they would’ve raised their kids better, but …

Matthew Burns:
Right, exactly. But then, “Oh, we got King’s Hawaiian.”

Mick Torbay:
That’s right. Maybe they’re so focused on the bun strategy that they-

Matthew Burns:
They missed out on an opportunity to grow their campaign and have a campaign, period. But to grow the love of King’s Hawaiian through the characters. It’s a complete and utter miss, even though arguably it’s a great ad.

Mick Torbay:
I hesitate to call it a miss because we don’t know what their goals were. We can’t say they didn’t do a good job if we don’t know what they were trying to do. My question is, why were they trying to do one great ad when they had an opportunity to create a three-year campaign or a five-year campaign, taking this family and doing something with it and making them interesting and having those callbacks where 13 weeks later you watch another one and now the kids are playing hockey and the grandfathers-

Matthew Burns:
He’s stuck up in the stand.

Mick Torbay:
He’s stuck up in the stadium, can’t get down, and they’re eating buns or throwing buns onto the ice. I don’t know.

Matthew Burns:
The mail person is now the referee for some reason.

Mick Torbay:
Yeah, exactly. The postal worker is climbing over the penalty box. I don’t know. I mean, we’re writing ads here, which is always a mistake.

Matthew Burns:
We’re both writers so… [chuckles]

Mick Torbay:
As marketing people, I sort of think you built this thing which could have gone somewhere, and instead you made it a flash in the pan on purpose. And then next time you’re going to create a whole new thing and hope it’s as good as this one. Why don’t you think like a screenwriter-

Matthew Burns:
There we go.

Mick Torbay:
Instead of thinking like a copywriter who’s trying to win an award at the Clios or at Cannes and just say, “Hey, look, I wrote that great one-off ad.” Correct. It’s like, wouldn’t it be better to write a campaign that could serve this client for five years?

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Mick Torbay:
No, I agree. All the ingredients are right there.

Matthew Burns:
So if you’re a marketer, if you’re a business owner, all that is true. If you’re just a regular consumer who’s watching this, what do you think? I want to know down in the comments, are we making sense? Do you like campaigns that run for a really long time and keep growing on each other? Or do you really just want to see a whole bunch of one-off, really awesomely produced funny joke ads, or super serious or really emotional ads? Tell us down below, are we nuts that we want?

Mick Torbay:
Or what do you think would serve this brand better? Do you think one-off ads would serve the brand better than campaigns? Obviously, I clearly have an opinion, but I’m very interested in what people think. Maybe they think I’m wrong.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. Mick, you’re never wrong.

Mick Torbay:
And then I’ll have to yell at you because that’s what I do.

Matthew Burns:
So, okay. Well, listen, thank you for jumping on with me today. I really, really appreciate it. Mick, you’re the best, and we’ll see everybody on another episode.

Mick Torbay:
You’re very kind. We’ll see you again.

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