Reigning Masters Champion Bubba Watson stars in the first of a series of TV commercials for Bojangles’ Restaurants, Charlotte. The campaign, by advertising agency Boone Oakley, Charlotte, is intended to build sales of Bojangles’ breakfast meals (available all day). The first spot rolls out this month across Southeastern state markets.
The focus is on the meals’ defining ingredient, the Bojangles’ Breakfast Biscuit, always made from scratch and served within 20 minutes. The strategy gives a public face to Bojangles’ internal biscuit-quality efforts. Every Bojangles’ location has an official “Biscuit Maker” on staff, the only one who does the job. Each has completed a minimum of 40 hours of training. They compete annually to win the chain-wide title of “Master Biscuit Maker,” and with it, a prize of $1000.
The new spots mimic a “celebrity competition” TV show, pitting a recognized sports figure in a 30-second bake-off against a Master Biscuit Maker. A dramatic soundtrack and a competition style V.O. try to build suspense. Spoiler alert: the Biscuit Maker wins. Always.
In the first spot Bubba Watson uses his driver to knead the dough and to place it inside, or actually, outside, the oven door. Watson is a big (6’ 3”), fun-loving guy, and he asked that the spot end with him him teeing off on a little old Bojangles’ biscuit… so he could “see it explode.” In an unfortunate bit of timing, the spot was filmed during a mid-March off week in Watson’s tournament schedule. When he won the Masters, in mid-April, it added “hundreds” of dollars, the agency says, in post-production costs for revised title graphics.
The second spot, breaking in late spring/early summer, will feature sports fisherman Guy Eaker, of TV’s Bass Master series. Further sports celebs are undetermined.
The TV buy targets families, 35 – 54, with kids, and Millennials, 18 – 34, via all broadcast networks, plus TimeWarner cable. Programming ranges from NASCAR to Fox Sports South fishing to American Idol to the Academy of Country Music.
