Campaign Trail: Campbell’s Chunky celebrates meatheads like Jason Kelce

Next month, The Campbell Soup Company will ask shareholders to approve renaming the 150-year-old business to The Campbell’s Company. Even if that happens, Campbell’s will likely remain a soup, and consumers will know what the Campbell’s Chunky brand has inside the can: large chunks of meat and protein that make it a “soup that eats like a meal.”

Chunky played with two of those “hunks” by casting two football greats – New York Giants nose tackle Dexter Lawrence and retired Philadelphia Eagles center (and pop culture phenom) Jason Kelce – in its latest campaign. The experiment, created by Publicis agency Leo Burnett, began Sept. 9 and will run on TV and online video, including during football broadcasts on Amazon, NBC, ESPN, CBS and more.

In her 15-second spot, Lawrence eats juice at the gym, her biceps ripping through her t-shirt and a “Stay Sexy” decal — a nod to her “Sexy Dexy” nickname — is visible on the mirror. As for him, Kelce puts on a coat and sleeps in front of the fireplace, drinking juice on bear skins. The characters speak to Chunky’s emphasis on football and beauty.

“When we started our ambitions this year, it was focused on bringing meaning and character to those products that are really differentiating from the competition and more interesting relationships by bringing younger customers into the category,” said Pete Herron, director of marketing. Campbell’s.

The ads support the two pillars of Chunky’s brand identity – beef and spicy – while continuing to be funny and not take the brand too far in the way of breaking through and creating and bringing attention to the segment.

Game won in the trenches

Countless brands have rushed to partner with the NFL and its players for campaigns designed for the start of the football season. For Chunky, an NFL sponsor since 1998 and the sponsor with the second longest tenure, finding the right talent is critical to the campaign.

“When you think about who our customers are, there are marketing archetypes, just like every customer,” Herron said. “He is the man who is not often celebrated, but he is the one who always works and is always reliable.”

While many brands have turned to so-called skill positions like quarterback (hello, Brock Purdy), Chunky has made a deliberate decision to focus on offensive and defensive linemen: Players who drive the results of games but don’t have the fame or quality of those football-handling players.

“We thought there was a good symmetry to who our customer was,” Herron explained. “For us at the Chunky brand, it was an exciting way to try to bring out the talent pool of the NFL.”

With Lawrence, Chunky secured a defensive line that is not only one of the best players on the field, but also an amazing and charming person off the field. The brand associated “Sexy Dexy” with the popular Chunky variety Chili Mac and played with the asymmetry and humor of someone who eats juice at the gym.

Using Kelce

Kelce’s relationship with Chunky began with a campaign last year that saw him in an ad alongside his brother Travis and mother Donna. The spot, called “Bragging Rights,” followed the brothers’ face at Super Bowl LVII.

Since then, the Kelce brothers have been in the news, thanks to Travis’ relationship with Taylor Swift and Jason’s post-career, off-field antics (The pair recently signed a $300,000, three-year deal with Amazon’s Wondery for the rights to their podcast, “New Heights.”). But Jason brings more than a cache of culture to his Chunky space.

“It was really this great intersection for us to be able to develop him as this real, connective tissue to every man, but also, he has the kind of character to really pull and laugh in a compelling way,” Herron said. .

Having Jason Kelce lying in a robe on a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace may not work for every genre, even if it’s more PG than Burt Reynolds’ iconic 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold. Herron says it’s easy to imagine Chunky’s new campaign from a weekly meeting between the brand and an organization called, appropriately, Monday Morning Quarterbacks.

“We would all jump on the Teams phone and talk about our different teams, or different things we were seeing in culture, and different reactions to things we were seeing…someone is funny,” said Herron. “Laughter … can be collective, but it takes time to get there.”