Building Brands

It started with a direct message to me on LinkedIn. The Netflix Consumer Products team was wondering whether Baskin-Robbins would be interested in producing some themed ice cream to promote the launch of Season 3 of Stranger Things.

Certainly the chance to partner with Netflix selling Stranger Things-themed ice cream was compelling, but this was the hottest streaming show in the world and Baskin-Robbins needed to dramatically improve its relevance among Gen Z. I knew this could be the perfect solution for the brand. I quickly collaborated with R&D and our agency, 22squared, to create a MUCH larger proposal and a few weeks later we flew out to Los Angeles to pitch Netflix on the concept.

They bought it. ALL OF IT.

The core of our strategic approach was not about products, but about experiences. We proposed leveraging the existing passion Gen Z has for Stranger Things and give them experiences that they couldn’t get anywhere else. When the dust settled, we brought Stranger Things the streaming series to our guests in 3D, complete with full store takeovers, an 80s-themed video game/scavenger hunt, a 30 foot-long ice cream ship, multiple licensed products like a BR/Stranger Things Funko POP! and yes, Stranger Things-themed ice cream. 

The biggest challenge? Convincing leadership (and the finance guys) to spend more on production than on paid media. In business you have to know when to take a calculated risk. This partnership had the potential to be huge, and I understood Gen Z doesn’t respond well to traditional advertising. We needed to ensure the experience was authentic and compelling, and took the risk that “if you build it, they will come”. The results were nothing short of amazing, including an 11-point turnaround to Baskin-Robbins’ overall business, over 4 Billion PR impressions (in only 60 days) and a sales halo that lasted over a year. As a result, I was given the 2019 Baskin-Robbins Top of the Pyramid Award as the brand’s top performer. Watch the 2-minute recap of the effort and results here.

Following the success of the partnership with Stranger Things 3, Baskin-Robbins began developing more products to appeal to a younger, more diverse target. In 2021, the brand introduced the NEW Mangonada as a limited-time only beverage. What’s a mangonada? It’s a traditional Mexican drink made with mango, Tajin Seasoning (a spice made from chili peppers, lime and sea salt) and chamoy, a Mexican condiment. Baskin-Robbins would be the first restaurant chain in the United States to serve the Mangonada, as only local palaterias like La Michoacana and Zero Degrees were currently selling the beverage.

Although the product did well in focus groups, there was concern regarding how well the beverage would do in markets with small Hispanic populations. Beyond that, our marketing challenge would be two-fold: 1) as a mainstream brand, Baskin-Robbins would have to educate the vast majority of consumers on what a Mangonada is and 2) as a traditional Mexican beverage, the launch of the Mangonada by an American restaurant chain could be perceived as cultural appropriation and be met with a backlash from consumers.

Our strategic approach was to dig in and be as authentic as possible to the beverage’s Mexican roots. This was about celebrating (not appropriating) the food of another culture. The R&D and product marketing teams worked directly with authentic Mexican brands like Tajin, to ensure the Baskin-Robbins Mangonada delivered the right taste profile, rather than an “Americanized” version of the product. And as we worked on the campaign to support Mangonada, I worked very closely with my agency, 22 squared, and their Diversity & Inclusion team to ensure that we were delivering our message in an authentic way.

The product has a bold, refreshing taste, so our campaign would feature bright, vibrant colors in a traditional Mexican palette and patterns. To educate consumers, the campaign concept was “Mangonada in one word”, capturing the essence of the beverage taste and appeal, but in a very authentic, personal way. Our talent were Mexican-American social media influencers from a variety of backgrounds. In production, we didn’t style the talent - we asked them to represent themselves authentically, the way they would on their own social channels. Executions were simple, with our talent trying the beverage and describing it with the first word that came to mind, entirely unscripted. For Denise Jones, the reaction was emotional - the Mangonada reminded her of her abuela who would describe it as “sabrasito” (actually she said “Sabrasito, Dulcecito, Saladito…all the itos”) meaning “tasty” (…“sweet” and “salty”), Justice Alexander (aka “Legend”) had never had a mangonada before and described his first taste of it as “Bold!”, and when the Montoya Twins tried it, they recognized the authentic chili flavors of Tajin and chamoy and described it as “Chamazing!”

The introduction of the Mangonada ended up being the most successful beverage launch in the last 25 years at Baskin-Robbins. What started as a limited-time only beverage never left the menu, becoming a permanent item that is still on menus today.

Baskin-Robbins ice cream cakes are a very interesting marketing problem. Unlike the competition (from other ice cream brands and bakery cakes), Baskin-Robbins cakes are made with ice cream and cake. Because they are made with premium ice cream, they are also more expensive than the competition and there is lots of education involved, but once people do try a Baskin-Robbins cake, there is a high likelihood they will buy one again. By the fall of 2009, the Baskin-Robbins cake business was in significant decline and we recognized the need to support the business with advertising to see if we could reignite interest. The challenges were many and we had to be scrappy. With budgets low at the end of ice cream season, we could only afford a single 15-second spot within which we had to generate interest, educate consumers AND generate trial.

Backstory: In 2002 there was a very popular song by The Buckwheat Boyz called “Peanut Butter Jelly Time”. It was corny and fun and the very definition of an earworm - once you heard it, you could not get it out of your head. The Buckwheat Boyz followed that song in 2006 with one called “Ice Cream and Cake”. The song (and associated dance) was a favorite of cheerleaders at cheerleading camps.

Back to 2009: The brand planner (Ryan) at our advertising agency, Cliff Freeman & Partners, proposed The Ice Cream & Cake song was catchy enough to extend our small budget by being incredibly disruptive and unlike most songs used in commercials, it was also very on-brand (the original 15-second spot would end up repeating the phrase “Ice Cream & Cake” 16 times…). That alone could have been the end of a very good idea, but Ryan further suggested we include the little dance associated with the song. Cheerleaders were already posting videos of themselves doing the dance on social media. He suggested using cake toppers to do the dance. It was at that moment, everyone started to “lean in” on the conversation and you could feel the excitement. I’ve found that single, subtle cue is usually a great indicator of success with consumers, and that would be the case with “Ice Cream & Cake” as well.

We were intentionally VERY low-tech on production, using simple stop motion animation to produce each spot for 25% of what we had been spending on traditional commercials. And although we DID use cake toppers, we didn’t force ourselves to use only Baskin-Robbins cake toppers (creative license), but included fantastical toppers too like a T-Rex, robots and an astronaut. As we hoped, guests would later report hearing the spot come on, dropping what they were doing and dancing in front of the TV! The results in store were equally impressive - a 13-point change to the cake business in the first 3 months the spots aired. The results were so impressive, we extended the original campaign multiple times with variations for each cake holiday.

Recognizing we had a hit, we took the concept one step further. We invited guests to get together with friends and record themselves doing the “Ice Cream & Cake” dance and submit the videos as part of a contest. The result was tens of thousands of entries and hours of content for the brand. We also gathered 227 cheerleaders on the UCLA campus with Mario Lopez as emcee and performed the Ice Cream & Cake dance - a stunt that earned Baskin-Robbins a Guinness Book of Records world record (World’s Largest Cheerleader Dance) and almost 100 million PR impressions.

Ice cream is synonymous with summer. As an ice cream brand, the challenge isn’t getting people to think about going out for ice cream when it’s hot, it’s getting them to choose YOUR BRAND when they inevitably think about going out for ice cream. Top of mind awareness is key, and when you have small budgets you need to be scrappy. That doesn’t mean you can’t be creative though. Usually you need to be MORE creative.

In 2007, Baskin-Robbins needed a disruptive, on-brand way to remind people all summer long to choose Baskin-Robbins. One of the greatest equities Baskin-Robbins has as a brand is the pink spoon (guests are offered pink spoon samples of any flavor for free until they find their favorite). My solution was to create a 13-week, trivia-based scavenger hunt called “Find the Pink Spoon”. We worked with game experts at Blockdot like Dan Ferguson and the technical experts at Yahoo! and Mapquest to hide “virtual pink spoons” throughout the United States that guests could find only when they were viewing the map at street level. It was the first game using online mapping technology. We then offered a series of clues each week to help guests find the spoons. Guests who found the spoons would earn points for a chance to win valuable prizes of their choosing.

Oh right, prizes. We couldn’t afford to buy cool prizes AND produce the game, but knew prizes would be critical to interest and participation. Being scrappy, we spent months soliciting donations and partnerships (in exchange for mentions on the microsite) to create prizes worthy of a guest playing all summer long. Ultimately we received over $100,000 in donated value including a Chevy Colorado pickup truck, an all-expenses paid Australian adventure, a $2,000 Toys R Us shopping spree and much, much more. We also sent two massive SUVs driving around the country with a 10-foot-long pink spoon on the roof. Guests who found the truck would receive Baskin-Robbins gift cards on the spot.

The promotion was a huge success, building top-of-mind awareness for the brand during our critical peak season. Over 250,000 game plays were generated during the 2-month promotion with the average user playing for 3 weeks and spending 38 minutes per session in the game. 90% of users opted-in to the Baskin-Robbins Birthday Club e-mail list too. Find the Pink Spoon won the Buzz Award (AdWeek) for Online Gaming in 2009.

In 2000, L.L.Bean was one of the leading catalog retailers in the United States, with a database of about 30 million customers and mailing out over 200 million catalogs per year. Unfortunately, they were also an aging brand, with an AVERAGE customer age of 50 years-old. That year, L.L.Bean challenged the team at Mullen to expand their database by 3 million new names while simultaneously lowering the average age of their database by 2 years (if you’re doing the math at home, that meant we needed those 3 million names to be (on average) about 28 years-old.

The problem, we realized, was that over time Bean had become less of an authentic outdoor apparel brand and more of a “casual Friday” apparel brand. They were no longer aspirational so much as “comfortable” selling khakis and button-down shirts. Our solution was to remind people that L.L.Bean was their trusted resource for an authentic connection to the outdoors. Our campaign started with an amazingly well-crafted tagline, “start here GO ANYWHERE”. “start here” was intentionally lowercase: L.L.Bean was meant to be the first step in your personal adventure. “GO ANYWHERE” was capitalized and italic: caps to convey the determination behind the message and italics to convey action. In total, the message was “starting at L.L.Bean prepares me for any adventure” whether hiking the Adirondacks or simply going out to meet up with friends.

Ads featured the new tagline along with photography and copy that was aspirational, e.g. “DON’T MISTAKE a street address for where you actually LIVE.” In the lower right-hand corner of every ad was a symbolic “catalog” featuring the new tagline, and 2-3 popular products sold by Bean that were appropriately related to that “adventure”. The call to action tied to a URL (or Business Reply Card) to capture the consumer’s name & address, since acquisition was the business goal.

The campaign was a smash hit, lowering the age of L.L.Bean’s database by just over 2 years in the first 12 months and exceeding the already aggressive number of names acquired by 3%. The campaign also received an MPA Kelly Finalist award for outstanding execution in print advertising. Building on our success, Mullen would later work with L.L.Bean to build a new Outdoors business unit (to add to Men’s, Women’s, Children’s and Home) and shift from catalogs to online sales to further reclaim their heritage while simultaneously attracting younger customers. In 2002, I was even able to get the United States Olympic Committee to offer L.L.Bean the right to be the Official Outfitter of the 2002 US Olympic team in Salt Lake City with NO sponsorship fee - Bean would only need to provide the apparel for free. L.L.Bean would turn down the offer - one of the biggest regrets of my career - and Roots (a Canadian brand) would make history.

Because the Super Bowl is a single game, football is the only one of the four major sports that can make an major “event” out of its finale. There is simply too much time needed to prepare. For the NBA (and MLB and NHL), that event is their All-Star Weekend, a non-stop series of public and private events held over the the course of 3 days in a different host city each year. In 1998, the NBA All-Star Weekend was held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, making it THE hardest invitation to get in sports. The 1998 NBA All-Star Weekend was special not only because it was in New York, but because of the players involved that year - Michael Jordan was back from retirement, Kobe Bryant was an emerging rookie labeled “the next Jordan”, and oh, there were also guys by the name of David Robinson, Shaquille O’Neal, Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan, Reggie Miller and Karl Malone playing. In fact, of the 24 players who played that year, 13 are now inducted in the NBA Hall of Fame. In addition, celebrity attendance was at an all-time high given the high profile nature of the Weekend. Celebrity attendance included Jack Nicholson, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, Madonna, Venus and Serena Williams, Brandy, Stevie Wonder, Tyra Banks, Nick Lachey, and many, many more. With so much attention on a single weekend, the need for perfection in every detail was crucial.

NBA Entertainment is a division of the NBA whose responsibility it is to promote the game of basketball both inside and outside the US. As a Creative Services Manager, I was responsible for managing the entirety of the non-broadcast promotion of the 1998 NBA All-Star Game including the design and execution of all assets for NBA All-Star Weekend like the NBA TeamUp® celebration, all NBA All-Star Game events (All-Star Game, Rookies Game, 3-point Shootout, Celebrity Game and NBA/WNBA 2-ball), tickets, programs and graphics inside and outside of Madison Square Garden. Not only was every detail covered (imagine the stress of printing and security around event tickets alone…each worth thousands of dollars on the open market to counterfeiters) but as part of my responsibilities, I introduced the NBA to the use of 3M Scotchprint® Graphics, a photographic adhesive-backed film which I used throughout Madison Square Garden to promote the event. I had learned about Scotchprint® in my previous role at Grey Advertising working on the 3M business. The use included life-sized graphics of players in action (shown above) throughout the concourse as well as a 25-foot high graphic of NBA Hall of Famer (and New York Knick) Patrick Ewing at the entrance to The Garden. The NBA would go on to adopt the use of Scotchprint® across its teams the following year.

The 1998 NBA All-Star Weekend is STILL considered one of the best events in NBA history.

In 1994, Canon introduced the NEW Canon EOS-1N, their high-end professional single-lens reflex (SLR) camera body. The EOS-!N retailed for $2,300 with professional lenses ranging from $500 to over $10,000. The leaders in the US camera market at the time were Nikon and Canon, with Canon owning the lion’s share of the amateur market and Nikon considered the leader in professional systems. The challenge for professional photographers was that Canon and Nikon cameras were not compatible. You couldn’t put a Nikon lens on a Canon camera body or vice versa. Because of price and incompatibility, both companies knew that most photographers selected which camera system they would adopt early on in their careers and would continue to build and replace within that same system for the rest of their career driving intense loyalty. An additional challenge was that professional cameras were often built with different specialties (shutter speed, light metering, color range, lens clarity, autofocus speed) and different systems appealed to different styles of photographer depending upon whether you primarily shot commercial, sports, fashion, documentary or landscape. Canon was hoping the EOS-1N would be used by pros for a variety of needs.

Our problem as an agency was how to best promote the new EOS-1N system to ensure Canon would maximize adoption among as broad a range of professional (and high-end amateurs) as possible. Our solution was to take advantage of a program the Canon Professional Services team was already utilizing. This team was responsible for providing the most notable professional photographers with “loaner equipment” so they could test out new camera bodies and lenses. In turn, Canon was able to promote the fact that elite photographers were using their equipment.

Our creative concept was to position Canon as the emerging experts in professional photography by showcasing the absolute best Canon photography from the widest array of photographic styles and providing expert-level professional detail from the photographer’s themselves regarding how Canon equipment helped make each photograph exceptional. The campaign tagline was “Now It’s Canon” (a reference to Canon’s emerging status as a leader in professional photography). My job was to research and track down the best photographs from the best photographers, negotiate the rights to the images, ensure the highest level of reproduction quality available and work with the photographer and the Canon Professional Services team to solicit the expert detail behind every photo. In the end, the campaign featured work by Jose Azel (sports), Jack Barrie (wildlife), Chris Rainier (travel), Michel Tcherevkoff (fashion) and Larry Towell (documentary), in single and multi-page spreads in both photography magazines as well as magazines with related subject matter (like Sports Illustrated, in the case of Azel). Rather than relying on the magazine printing quality and paper stock (often low-quality), we printed inserts on high-end paper which were then glued into premium positions in each magazine. The campaign was a turning point for Canon Cameras, propelling them into the lead in the professional camera space, which they still own today.