Let's get hungry

Last week, in between the creation of new Trump memes and the hourly checking of our total us debt at usdebtclock.org, I found myself chatting with Claudia Caplan.

Claudia is an old old friend.
Not that she's old, just that we've known each other a very long time.

I knew Claudia before she knew me, in that I was a big fan of her work. Notably her incredible portfolio of radio commercials. You see she is a copywriter. And a Creative Director. She also went on to become a Chief Marketing Officer at Earthlink, where we met in person and she became a client.

And a friend.

It's safe to say she's one of the brightest women in advertising, though because of her disdain for gender acknowledgement she'd prefer I just describe as one of the brightest people in advertising. If an agency were looking for a new CCO they'd be wise to look Claudia's way.

In short, I trust her opinion. And when she says she finally saw a TV spot that caught her eye, that caught my ear.

"It's simple. It's forthright. And it cleverly hitches its pitch to the imagination of the senses and their ability to actually make a person hungry."

Interesting I thought.

Here it is for your inspection.

The way she described the spot was also suspiciously familiar. And upon viewing the spot, my suspicions were all confirmed.

You see, a little more than 15 years ago, we did the same thing for El Pollo Loco. We recognized that nothing makes people hungrier for barbecued chicken than the sight, sounds and imagined smell of barbecue chicken.

Add to that the restriction of a limited budget and the necessity to produce close to a 100 commercials in a year, and you can see why we landed, where we landed.

Here for your amusement, and comparison to the Kraft commercial, is a small sampling of the 92 commercials we made for El Pollo Loco.



The campaign was a huge success.
Except for the guy doing the voiceover.
He sucked.