SO, NOW we know a new method of selling books – give away free packets of crisps with each copy. It has worked for Mr Tayto. Perhaps Bertie Ahern could have tried it. (Insert lazy joke about further similarities here.)
It would be unfair to say that the success of Tayto's marketing campaign – based around his "autobiography" The Man Inside The Jacket– is purely thanks to cheese-and-onion- flavoured bribery because they only did that in some shops. Instead, it has been a brilliant campaign that has seen it sell 46,000 copies so far. It sits on top of this week's Hardback Non-Fiction chart. Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson and the Guinness Book of Recordshave each been beaten by an anthropomorphic crisp.
In all, the campaign has cost Tayto over €1 million and this week is probably the point at which it could say it was worth it. What has it done with the money? It has stuck ads for the book on the side of 20 of its trucks; it has hired Frank Kelly as Mr Tayto's "agent"; it has sent the Man Inside The Jacket– or more likely, a student inside a sweaty costume – to 10 towns so far. It has run billboard, TV and cinema ads and deployed every potato and crisp pun known to man. And it has put the book in more than a thousand shops. (What other books do you see in newsagents?) To the books's ubiquity it added decent value (€5.99). Crisps were thrown in to complete the deal.
It should be all too easy to be cynical about the campaign. After all, Mr Tayto is no more than a local parallel of Ronald McDonald: a trademark, a brand, a brainwave in an advertising agency. The Irish public has conspired in putting an advert at the top of the book charts.
And yet, it has succeeded because when Tayto decided to do this, it decided to do it right. It got the guys behind Podge and Rodge to write the book. And the “autobiography” itself is gently humorous, rampantly nostalgic and makes sure to turn Mr Tayto into a Forrest Gump-like figure, popping up alongside major figures of the past few decades. It is also more readable than a book about a pretend crisp should ever be.
The Irish books market has never come close to matching the British appetite for quirky comedy books. There, every sketch show and TV quiz produces what are effectively grown-up versions of the annuals that kids love. They are scrap books, and scrappy books; toilet books as disposable as the paper. The Man Inside The Jacketfills that gap, but more than that, it plays up on the modern trend in autobiographies. In an Irish context, it most obviously apes Bill Cullen's It's A Long Way From Penny Apples. More broadly, it's only marginally less legitimate than the autobiographies of various pop stars, models and footballers, whose lives are hardly enough to sustain a couple of chapters but whose books are at the frontline of their own brand campaigns.
The campaign succeeded partly because Tayto is reliant on the brand already being seen as somehow integral to a sense of Irishness. You might have thought that was enough in itself to keep the brand afloat, but the arrival of Walkers has posed a challenge that patriotism alone couldn’t withstand. Tayto changed ownership in 2006, and the revitalisation of the brand can be traced to the €62 million paid by Ray Coyle’s Largo foods. (It owns King crisps too.) The book is the latest round of a longer game, which has seen Mr Tayto search for a woman and run in the recent general election. We’ve become so sold on the idea that all decent marketing campaigns have to be online viral successes, it is comforting in a way to see that Tayto has largely made this one work in old-fashioned print.
The Man Inside The Jacketsold 2,075 copies this week according to the most recent figures, which wouldn't take into account the bounce that will have followed a plug on The Late Late Toy Show. It may well be number one again as a result. Sure, it's a clinical million-euro advertising campaign aimed at getting us to eat something that's not very good for us or our kids. But it's hard not to have respect for it.
