Sameness Sucks
The Sonic 2 Guys Campaign
Sonic was mired in a sea of fast-food sameness, all food and no personality. No one truly understood its unique menu (pancake on a stick, anyone?) and its new monthly offerings.
Our goal was to create a campaign as unique as the food.
What we did
We used two improv actors (TJ and Pete), threw them in a car on a Sonic lot and let them riff about the food. With very little budget (about 600k a shoot) we were able to create several commercials to run every month for a single product. The result was a campaign like no other.
The numbers
+10.7%
in sales after first year of the campaign
4x
outspent by McDonalds, but we created higher awareness
+6.5%
same store sales for seven years straight
As Sonic’s menu evolved, so did our audience, so we introduced Brian & Molly as our Sonic Couple to promote more “grown up” food items.
Unprompted by us, fans started creating their own Sonic commercials on YouTube. So we challenged them for more and then rewarded the best.
To attract a new audience to new menu items, we seized on a unique media buy during the height of MTV’s show The Hills. During the first commercial break of each new episode, we premiered a show we created called The Stalls. It ran for 13 weeks (sadly no one came to us for a reup) and concluded during The Hills finale.
The flexibility of our productions allowed us to seize on several non-traditional opportunities. These commercials ran in movie theaters along with the trailers.
To promote that Sonic had 168,894 drink combinations, we created an interactive microsite called Make TJ Drink. Fans could spend hours mixing different drink combinations to see if they could find TJ’s favorite drink, or just to watch the over 100 different reactions we created.