Saatchi & Saatchi London’s new campaign for Richmond Sausages is interesting because it doesn’t focus on food. It avoids all the conversations about processed meats and goes right to the brand’s heart, which is about “Keeping the peace at mealtimes…”
Richmond Foods is “home of the Peace Keeping Sausage.” In the spirit of keeping family peace, and to whoosh the brand up to the top tier of family essentials, Saatchi & Saatchi London has developed a campaign around a toy-tracking microchip that reveals the whereabouts of a lost Teddy (or Panda, or Tigger…) on mum or dad’s phone.
The Bluetooth tracking device, developed with technology partner Amigo Partnership, will be available through on-pack giveaways. It has to be won, but there are 200,000 Richmond toy-tracking devices to be handed out. And the emotional bond that the campaign builds between parent and Richmond is free for everyone.
The campaign’s caption, Keep the whole family together with Richmond and a toy tracking chip, brings that bond to the fore.
Richard Huntington, chief strategy officer at Saatchi & Saatchi London group noted, “It’s every parent’s nightmare: the words ‘where’s blanky/bear/la la/bobbit’ followed by the realisation that they are somewhere between gran’s house and the services on the M6. Solving a crisis like this is a perfect role for Richmond, a brand built on bringing every member of the family together.”
The Richmond Sausages & Chip TV ad follows the real story of the Wright family and its five year old daughter, Emily. Emily’s love for her Teddy is threaded through the Wright’s family life as a whole. When Teddy goes missing, the whole family is affected. The ad is an emotional roller coaster, triggering (re-triggering in most cases) all the emotions of having a child lose – and find – a favourite toy.
Even the how to use your Richmond toy-tracking device video is a heart-tugger.
Built around the TVC is a series of short documentary films, which will be shown online, in which Richmond explores three other real life families, each of whose stories demonstrate the unbreakable bonds and larger-than-life roles their children’s toys have played in their children’s lives – and therefore also in their own.
The Richmond Sausages & Chip app, which can be downloaded from either the App or Google Play store, uses a range of technology to help reunite children with their lost toy. By combining low power Bluetooth, sound and a phone’s GPS, it makes losing teddy almost impossible. The Bluetooth signal and speaker helps locate teddy when it’s nearby, letting parents know when it is in the next-door room or within arm’s reach. When teddy gets left behind on a day out, the app uses a phone’s GPS to help record its location, using the GPS co-ordinates of where it last received a Bluetooth signal so parents know where to return to look for teddy even 1000 miles away.
The whole (£3 million) campaign encompasses a 60 second core commercial, a 30 second cut down, and additional edits used in the social campaign across Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook.
The core (60 second) ad launched in X Factor. Its 30 second cut down will run throughout December and January on live TV, cinema, broadcaster VOD, online video and on-pack. Video content from the campaign will be shared on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Andy Jex, executive creative director, Saatchi & Saatchi London commented, “If a few less toys get lost this Christmas and a few more sausages get wrapped in blankets, then it’s job done.”
