SAMENESS SUCKS
The Sonic 2 Guys Campaign
It all started as a Sonic convention video that my creative partner and I created. We shot ourselves at McDonald’s and Burger King drive-thrus trying to order menu items that were only available at Sonic. The franchisees loved it and a year later, the Sonic 2 Guys campaign was born. We opted for some real comedic talent (TJ and Pete) so it was actually funny.
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PROBLEM
Sonic Drive-In was mired in a sea of fast-food sameness – all food and no personality. The consequence of this was that no one paid attention to Sonic’s unique food (pancake on a stick, anyone?) and its new monthly offerings.
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ACTION
We created a campaign as unique as Sonic’s food. We used TJ and Pete, two improv actors and shot them in the car riffing about Sonic’s made-to-order burgers, the real fruit they put in their shakes and yes, even pancake on a stick. It was the lowest of low-fi productions where a 600k budget would produce upwards of three to five commercials.
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RESULTS
•To this day, it remains the longest running campaign in US history.
•A year after the campaign launched, stores saw sales increases as much as +10.7% from the year prior.
•The campaign created higher awareness than McDonalds, despite being outspent by them by 4Xs.
•Sonic saw on average 6.5% same store sales increase year over year 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.
The campaign became so popular that people started creating their own Sonic commercials on YouTube, completely unprompted by us. We sent current creators a love letter and challenged future ones.
A little later, we rewarded the best videos with an awards ceremony.
Sonic wanted to attract women to new menu items so we seized on a unique media buy during the height of MTV’s show The Hills. We premiered our own episodes of 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.
Because our shoot productions were so flexible, we seized several non-traditional opportunities to promote Sonic. To expand beyond traditional TV, we created these commercials to run in movie theaters along with the trailers.
To promote that Sonic had 168,894 different drink combinations and to position Sonic as Your Ultimate Drink Stop, we created an interactive microsite called Make TJ Drink. Fans could spend hours mixing different drink combinations to find TJ’s favorite drink, or just to watch the over 100 different reactions we created.
Not 2 Guys related but still worth mentioning
During the NCAA Tournament, we wanted to keep Sonic’s EveryDay Value Menu top of mind during the games, so we gave fans a unique way to throw shade at their rivals. Tater Taunt was a text to voice microsite that allowed you to write a taunt and have it delivered from an angry tater tot. Sonic didn’t have official sponsorship money, but Tater Taunt made Sonic an active participant in the tournament versus just a spectator.