Campaign Trailer: Campbell’s Chunky celebrates muscular hunks like Jason Kelce

Next month, Campbell Soup Company will ask shareholders to approve renaming the 155-year-old company The Campbell’s Company. Even if that happens, Campbell’s will likely remain synonymous with soup, and consumers will still know what the Campbell’s Chunky brand contains inside the can: big chunks of meat and protein that make it “the soup you eat like a meal.”

Chunky played double entendre around those “hunks” by choosing two burly football greats – New York Giants nose tackle Dexter Lawrence and retired Philadelphia Eagles center (and pop culture phenomenon) Jason Kelce – in his latest countryside. The initiative, created with Publicis agency Leo Burnett, began on September 9 and will run on TV and online video, including during football broadcasts on Amazon, NBC, ESPN, CBS and more.

In his 15-second spot, Lawrence eats soup at the gym, his biceps tearing off his shirt and a “Stay Sexy” decal — a nod to his nickname “Sexy Dexy” — visible on the mirror. For his part, Kelce dons a robe and lounges in front of a fireplace, sipping soup as he runs in a bearskin. The commercials talk about Chunky’s emphasis on kick and flavor.

“This year, when we embarked on our ambitions, the goal was to give meaning and personality to those product attributes that really differentiate themselves from the competition and are particularly interesting as younger consumers approach the category,” he said Pete Herron, marketing director of Campbell’s.

The ads support the two pillars of Chunky’s brand identity – chunky and spicy – ​​while continuing to lean into humor and not taking the brand too seriously in an effort to creatively break through and bring more attention to the category.

A match won in the trenches

Countless brands have rushed to partner with the NFL and its players for targeted campaigns as the football season begins. For Chunky, an NFL partner since 1998 and a sponsor with the second longest tenure, finding the right talent was critical for the campaign.

“When you think about who our consumers are, there are classic advertising archetypes, like the everyman consumer,” Herron said. “He’s someone who isn’t necessarily always celebrated, but he’s the one who always gets the job done and is always reliable.”

While many brands have targeted players at so-called skill positions like quarterbacks (hello, Brock Purdy), Chunky made the deliberate choice to focus on offensive and defensive linemen: the players who determine the outcomes of games but without the notoriety or charm of their players. teammates running football.

“We thought there was a really nice symmetry with who our consumer is,” Herron explained. “For us at the Chunky brand, it was a really fun way to try to continue the partnership with NFL talent.”

With Lawrence, Chunky has secured a defensive lineman who is not only one of the best players on the field, but also a charismatic and charming character off the field. The brand paired “Sexy Dexy” with the popular Chunky Chili Mac variety and played up the asymmetry and humor of someone eating soup at the gym.

Capitalize on Kelce

Kelce’s collaboration with Chunky dates back to a campaign last year that featured him in an ad alongside his brother Travis and mother Donna. The commercial, titled “Bragging Rights,” followed the brotherly confrontation at Super Bowl LVII.

Since then, the Kelce brothers have become ubiquitous in the media, largely thanks to Travis’ relationship with Taylor Swift and Jason’s post-career off-camera antics (the pair recently signed a three-year, $100 million deal with Wondery’s Amazon for the rights to their podcast, “New Heights.”). But Jason brings more than just cultural richness to his place at Chunky.

“It was a really great crossover for us to be able to leverage him as a real connective tissue for each man, but he also has the kind of personality to bring out the humor in a pretty compelling way,” Herron said. .

Having Jason Kelce lounging in a robe on a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace might not work for all brands, even if it’s more PG than Burt Reynolds’ iconic 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold. Herron attributes the ease with which the new Chunky campaign was able to be conceived to a weekly meeting between the brand and the agency called, appropriately, Monday Morning Quarterbacks.

“We would all join a Teams call and talk about our different teams, or the different things we were seeing in the culture, and the different reactions to the things we were seeing… We got to know each other, and then we really got a sense of one of They.” another’s sense of humor,” Herron said. “Humor … can be collective, but it takes a while to get there.”