Red Lobster Campaign to Showcase Some of Its Own Workers

That is the premise of a campaign for the Red Lobster chain of seafood restaurants, scheduled to begin on Monday. The theme of the campaign, “Sea food differently,” is new, replacing “Ignite the crave” (whatever that meant).

The approach of the campaign is new, too, focused on the workers who help bring Red Lobster’s fare to its customers. The initial two commercials — as well as content on substantially redesigned versions of the Red Lobster Web site, redlobster.com, and Facebook fan page, facebook.com/RedLobster — feature Jon Forsythe, who fishes for crabs in Alaska, and Charles Himple, who presides over the oak-wood grill at the Red Lobster restaurant in the Bronx.

Among those to appear in subsequent ads is Annie Sessler, who designed the artwork for Red Lobster’s menus.

The campaign will also significantly increase the Red Lobster presence in social media like Facebook and YouTube. The campaign is created for Red Lobster, a division of Darden Restaurants, by Grey New York, part of the Grey unit of the Grey Group, which is owned by WPP. The budget is being estimated at $110 million to $115 million.

The campaign is among several under way that seek to burnish brand images by using actual employees rather than actors. For instance, in new commercials for Perdue Farms, the chairman, Jim Perdue, is joined by workers, including the chief veterinarian, and a farm family that raises chickens for Perdue.

The strategy behind using so-called real people is to cater to consumers who “want to know a lot more about the company behind the product,” said John Bartelme, chief marketing officer at Perdue Farms. They are interested in brands they perceive to be authentic or genuine, with a history and track record, rather than the spawn of slick corporate marketing.

Red Lobster “is a great brand with a great heritage, a place where America goes for seafood” since 1968, said Salli Setta, executive vice president for marketing at Red Lobster in Orlando, Fla.

“We have a unique story to tell and that story is best told through our people,” she added. “We think of them as ‘the real people of Red Lobster.’ ”

The story the workers are to tell will include chapters about new fare like wood-fire grilled dishes and a “today’s fresh fish menu”; remodeling the restaurants with a New England motif; and a new logo that proclaims “Fresh Fish, Live Lobster.”

Ms. Setta said she did not believe the proliferation of real-people ads would dent the effectiveness of her campaign because “so much of the interaction” that consumers have with the Red Lobster brand “occurs with our people at the restaurants.”

In focus groups, consumers who saw the campaign “related to the stories, related to the real people,” she added.

In turning to workers to be the mainstay of its ads, Red Lobster is playing down an approach for which it has long been known: commercials celebrating lavishly photographed food. Some spots still include such beauty shots, only now pairing them with workers like Mr. Forsythe and Mr. Himple.

That shift, along with the theme “Sea food differently,” are meant to “force reappraisal” of Red Lobster among potential customers, said Tor Myhren, president and chief creative officer at Grey New York, by signaling that “there’s change in the air, a different Red Lobster than you think you know.”

Because some consumers had developed “a sense” that Red Lobster “was becoming less authentic,” he added, the campaign is intended to “prove that authenticity by showing the real people, the real places, with real dialogue that is not scripted.”

Using workers for that purpose is not “an entirely new concept,” Mr. Myhren acknowledged, but “we hope the way we execute it” will help the ads stand out.

A sibling of Red Lobster’s in the Darden family, Olive Garden, recently had problems with consumer perceptions of the authenticity of new menu items bearing coined names like pastachetti and soffatelli. After sales suffered, the dishes were replaced with more familiar fare.

The new Red Lobster campaign arrives amid continuing uncertainty over the course of the economy. It has been challenging for casual-dining chains like Red Lobster to attract customers as worried consumers trade down to cheaper places to eat out — or even eat more often at home.

To address the reality of “somewhat of a rattled consumer,” Ms. Setta said, Red Lobster is looking to its roots as a restaurant that “delivered seafood to everyday people at an affordable price.”

“We have to deliver superior value to our guests,” she added, which is conveyed in ads that will “talk openly about prices, to reassure guests that when they come to Red Lobster they can afford the food.”

Red Lobster spent $38.2 million on advertising in major media in the first quarter, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, compared with $37.2 million in the same period last year.

In addition to Grey New York, the creative agency of record for television and digital ads, Red Lobster is working with Starcom, a media agency that is part of the Starcom MediaVest Group unit of the Publicis Groupe.

Among the nontraditional aspects of the campaign will be a 90-second version of the commercial with Mr. Forsythe, to run during “Deadliest Catch — Behind the Scenes” on Tuesday on the Discovery cable channel.

And “we do plan to explore” starting a feed on Twitter, Ms. Setta said, as part of the efforts to expand Red Lobster’s presence in social media.

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Five Reasons Google+ Is Exploding — and Could Actually Hurt Facebook

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So Google+ obviously has some traction. Just a few weeks after its launch, Google CEO Larry Page revealed that the nascent social network already had 10 million users. But will it ultimately blow up enough — and matter enough — to become a problem for Facebook? Yeah, I think so. (Ad Age Managing Editor Ken Wheaton isn’t so sure.) Here’s why:

1. THE POWER OF METAPHORS.
Google+ has circles, Facebook has friends. The idea of grouping people into circles is hardly new — just ask Dante — but it’s refreshing because I think it’s safe to say that we’re all pretty sick of the horrible things Facebook has done to the word “friend.” Friending people was a lame concept at Friendster in 2002, it got lamer at MySpace in 2003 (Tom Anderson: everyone’s friend!) and it got unbearably lame starting in 2004 thanks to Facebook. The suffocating hypergrowth of Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard-dorm project meant that friendship got converted into a form of conceptual Silly Putty. Which is why you’re likely Facebook chums with distant relatives, random acquaintances, old high-school classmates and other assorted nudniks who guilted you into accepting their f-f-f… — Damn it! Don’t make me say it again! — requests.

There is a banal, binary logic to Facebook’s way of viewing reality. Google+ is also, of course, a giant, soulless spreadsheet stored on endless racks of humming servers, but at least it very simply and elegantly allows us to do what comes naturally to us as humans: compartmentalize our lives.

2. GOOGLE+ IS A PURPOSE-BUILT ANNEX, NOT NEW CONSTRUCTION.
In a recent AdAge.com DigitalNext post, Ian Shafer, the CEO of Deep Focus, described Google+ as a “real-time content-sharing and discovery engine” that offers “tight integration with Google’s own suite of content creation and consumption products and properties.” Google+, in other words, is a new window into a world most all of us already inhabit. Google’s new social network simply gives us a familiar — but more flexible — tool set to navigate that world … seamlessly.

3. GOOGLE+ IS A CHANCE FOR A SOCIAL-MEDIA DO-OVER.
Ezra Klein of the Washington Post recently wrote that Google+ offers “an opportunity to start over, to build your social network with years of Facebook experience in mind, rather than having to face the accretion of mistakes and miscalculations you made over almost a decade of trial-and-error with a new technology.” I agree! Klein also writes that “It’s not Facebook’s fault that ‘what it means’ to have a Facebook account has changed four or five times over the last few years, even as most of us have only had one profile over that period.” And here I disagree because of …

4. FACEBOOK RAGE.
TheAtlantic.com recently published a list of “The 19 Most Hated Companies in America” based on data from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index. Thanks to privacy concerns, Facebook is No. 10, putting it in such august company as Comcast and JPMorgan Chase. Now I’m not saying that Google+ doesn’t have its own privacy issues, but I do think there is a critical mass of consumer resentment toward Facebook’s general arrogance and its dodgy shape-shifting over the years in regard to its default sharing settings. We mostly haven’t done anything (until now) about our collective Facebook rage because, well, what were we going to do? Go back to MySpace?

5. THE SOCIAL-MEDIA PORTABILITY PROBLEM IS OVERBLOWN.
Facebook reports that its average user has 130 “friends.” In reality, I think most Facebook users — including self-absorbed media, marketing and tech people who might pride themselves on high friend counts — maintain considerably smaller clusters of actually meaningful Facebook connections. We may technically have 130 (or 400 or 2,000) friends, but in practice we’re regularly sharing information with a truly engaged audience in the low dozens, if that.

It’s exhausting for us media/marketing/tech dorks to contemplate moving our many hundreds or thousands of “friends” away from Facebook — so we have a distorted view of the so-called social-media-portability problem. (As for populating Google+ with our content: See No. 2, above.)

But let’s not forget recent history: Millions of regular people moved from Friendster to MySpace and from MySpace to Facebook without breaking a sweat.

Simon Dumenco is the “Media Guy” media columnist for Advertising Age. Follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.

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