Cramer Krasselt

This is work for Smart Ones, which is the brand of weight conscious, frozen dinners from Weight Watchers. My initial concern for this ad is that there is no way there is that much pasta in a Smart Ones dinner, so this is another case of the Campbell's soup ads with the marbles at the bottom of the bowl to make all of the vegetables rise to the top; I'm betting there are some marbles in there. Advertisements with food images often look so much better than the actual product that anyone with common sense knows not to expect their food to look anything like the picture, but this is actually a very legitimate form of deceptive advertising. Once I was able to get past the pasta, I noticed that this ad doesn't display the brand name anywhere on it. Instead, Cramer Krasselt throws a little mystery into the ad, asking the consumer to figure out who the brand is. It is almost unheard of to produce an ad that doesn't let consumers know who is doing the advertising; however, it has been done before, such as the TBWA prints ads for Snickers (but even those ads used the notorious brand typography that has become synonymous with the Snickers brand). The red box in the Smart Ones ad uses the brand's iconic red color, but this is not nearly as identifiable as the Snickers text style. The red box is actually a peel-away sticker that once peeled, reveals the brand name to curious consumers. Cramer Krasselt believes that this tactic was successful in engaging consumers because "the pause between the visual cue and the brand name was just enough to let the goodness of the food overcome the old, and mistaken, baggage of the brand." The "baggage" in question is really a nicer way of saying the brand's problem was that the food tasted bad. There is no mention of any improvements or changes made to the product; only that this campaign increased sales by 17 percent.