Storyboard: Into the Blues

Famous Dave’s lets blues music sing its tale of authenticity.

By Margaret Littman, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 5/1/2006

Last year, Famous Dave’s of America, the Minnetonka, Minn.-based barbecue chain, launched a black-and-white ad campaign set to blues music. The campaign was only the second year of television advertising in the chain’s nearly 12-year history.

The commercials showed how the Famous Dave’s concept developed. As its chefs and founder Dave Anderson looked all over the country for the best regional barbecue recipes, they “ran into a lot of blues music. There’s a natural connection between blues music and barbecue,” explains Vice President of Marketing Lane Schmiesing. “We used the black and white to grab interest. It had a documentary-esque feel, and then as you started to move into Famous Dave’s food, it became more vibrant, and moved into color.”

The campaign worked as intended. But as the publicly owned chain plans to expand at the rate of 25 to 30 units annually, primarily through franchising, that sort of aggressive growth prompted Famous Dave’s to create a new ad campaign that highlights its authentic barbecue and blues ambience.

“We just decided to take the original idea and make it better,” says Denny Haley, president and chief creative officer at BBDO Minneapolis, the agency that created the campaign. “It is still very much about the marriage of barbecue and blues. We’re just taking it up a notch.”

Filmed entirely in color, the new spots once again feature blues band Texas Slim and the Love Machine singing lyrics BBDO specifically wrote for the ad. The songs are rife with double entendres, referring to “a hunger inside me” and “now that I’ve found you, there’s nothin’ more to do.”

The team hired Danny Clinch, a director nominated for a Grammy for his work on a Bruce Springsteen video, to create the ads. “That’s how serious we were about this. It is really a short-form music video,” says Haley, who believes the spots are able to garner attention without getting off message. “A lot of [other] executions got in the way of the food. But marrying the blues music to the food worked really well.”

Food First
This second iteration of the musical campaign began airing in early March. The three spots, available in both 15- and 30-second formats, feature limited-time promotions such as the variety of catfish items on the menu, from blackened to fried. This summer’s commercials will highlight ribs, while the fall touts pork loin. Another version introduces customers to Famous Dave’s “To Go” carryout options.

Haley says the commercials feature more than one kind of barbecue to underscore Famous Dave’s authenticity. The ads specifically mention the chain’s many regional sauces such as tangy Georgia mustard and smoky Texas pit. The spots end with the tagline: “Real Honest Barbeque.”

Unlike their black-and-white predecessors, the new spots feature images of Famous Dave’s restaurant interiors from the back-of-the-house grill to the front-of-the-house waiters in addition to Texas Slim’s tunes, which are more upbeat and faster-paced than the ones it sung in the 2005 ads.

But Haley says the spots were created with the food in mind from the get-go. “This was not ‘have some blues music and then insert food.’”

No Cheap Shots
“This is a smart position, and it is working,” Haley says. “We never mention price. If someone wants to buy the cheapest barbecue, they’ll go find it. We are not commoditizing. We are [showing Famous Dave’s] as uncompromising. These musicians, Texas Slim, are guys who have not sold out, and [Famous Dave’s barbecue] is the same kind of thing.”

Such advertising doesn’t come cheap. According to TNS Media Intelligence, Famous Dave’s spent $2.5 million on advertising placement in 2005, up from $1.4 million in 2004. The chain subsidized the campaign with its first ad fund, in which franchisees contribute 1 percent of sales.

The ads are targeted to new, lapsed and current customers, ages 21 to 54, who are college educated. To reach that wide, varied audience, the commercials have been airing in a variety of time slots on both cable and network TV. Coordinating radio ads run during sports radio and adult rock programming.

But for all the emphasis on the menu, Schmiesing says, the chain brought in an unexpected new audience when it announced the agreement with Texas Slim and the Love Machine: “We started getting e-mail from their fan base.”

“America's Favorite ” Length: 30 seconds Watch the ad: High resolution Low resolution
1. [Blues music]	2. Voice-over: Famous Dave’s spent 25 years perfecting America’s favorite styles of barbecue.
3.	4. Like our slow-smoked chopped pork with tangy Georgia mustard sauce.
5.	6. And, if over 150 national and regional awards don’t convince you, the great taste will.
7.	8. Tagline: Real Honest Barbeque.