MEDIA & MARKETING:The challenge for the new ad campaign is to 'break through the noise'

IT’S NEARLY 50 years since Irish admen came up with the advertising slogan, “How do Jacob’s get the figs into the fig rolls?” The strapline still endures on every packet of the biscuits but for its latest TV commercials the brand is majoring on the biscuit’s taste appeal.

The two commercials depict a dozen characters dressed in red satin costumes pretending to be taste buds. They are excited at the prospect of the man whose mouth they are in chomping on a fig roll, the idea being to convey the message “Your taste buds want them”. The best thing that can be said about the ads is that they are quintessentially Irish – they definitely aren’t a creative execution dreamt up in London. As such, their very daftness may achieve the cut-through that the Irish brand owner desires.

Fig rolls is the top brand in the portfolio of Jacob Fruitfield, whose other biscuit and snack brands include Jacob’s cream crackers, the Boland’s range, TUC, Kimberley, Mikado and the Jacob’s creams range. Jacob Fruitfield accounts for seven of the top 10 best-selling biscuit brands in Ireland and to maintain that position chief executive Michael Carey is adamant that the company has to invest regularly in brand advertising. Says Carey: “Branding is much more important than price. Pricing is one part of the mix that you have to get right but the foundation of the brand is its relationship with the consumer. If we don’t get that right, we could keep dropping prices forever but it would never work as a business model.”

Carey is also on the board of Bord Bia, the State agency that supports Irish food products. He believes the responsibility for managing Irish food brands is down to the brand owners.

“You can’t sit there and complain that you are not getting any support. Owners of brands have to invest in those brands themselves.”

The necessary investment is substantial. According to Carey, the taste buds commercials cost about €200,000 to make and the airtime spend will be in the region of €800,000.

Carey says the challenge with the new campaign is to “break through the noise”. He adds: “The purpose is to remind people how good fig rolls taste. What made us choose this idea is that it stands out from the crowd. For a campaign to be really effective, it can’t just be a TV commercial. It has to work on point of sale, online and just about every medium. I would hope these ads will run through to next year. If the characters work, we will create other versions. The ad currently on air is the first of two executions with the second ad going on air in a couple of weeks.”

Chosen from 10 other ideas on the table, the taste buds ads were created by ad agency DDFHB.

Since the ads were made, Carey has moved all the Jacob Fruitfield brands, including fig rolls, to a different agency, Ogilvy.

While in the Jimmy Figgerty days, stunts included going into hotels and having Figgerty paged, and at one point having a racehorse called Jim Figgerty and questions even raised in the Dáil, the add-on activity for this new campaign will have the “bud” characters appearing on the streets and in supermarkets.

Despite the recession, Carey says consumers are eating as many biscuits as ever, though they are paying less.

“We are in a recession, not a famine. However, the price of all our biscuit products has been reduced by about 15 per cent.”

With the Bolands range, Carey cut the price of all the products to 99 cent, which he says has delivered a 25 per cent uplift in sales. “We have to understand how the needs and attitudes of consumers have changed over the last couple of years. High chocolate content, indulgent products such as chocolate Kimberley and Club Milks, are doing very well even though they are more expensive relative to other biscuits in our range. But at the same time families need to be able to buy products at competitive prices and we have to make sure our pricing and promotional strategy reflects that. Mechanisms such as extra biscuits in a pack and two for the price of one are some of the strategies that work.”