With media campaigns that usually centre around print or TV, New York Fries went with a radio-heavy campaign for its push on poutines earlier this spring, founder Jay Gould tells MiC.
“We have been in business for 27 years and the one medium we never used was radio,” he says. “I always felt what we were selling was more of a visual thing, but poutine maybe isn’t as visually appealing as the fries in a cup.”
The result of the campaign, voiced by Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent and launched in 34 markets across Canada, has been a 20.3% increase in same-store sales across the chain in April. Growth has been lead by the increased demand for poutine, says Gould, which now makes up 60% of all fry purchases.
Gould says getting New York Fries into the “centre of the plate” meal category rather than being seen as a snack was a main goal of the campaign, which was developed with media planning from the Toronto office of Media Experts and creative by Toronto-based agency Juniper Park.
“I think it’s too early to say whether we reached every member of the audience we wanted to,” he says. “We always had a very good following in the 17- to 25-year-old category, but lost customers because they went to university and moved on. We wanted to get moms and dads back into the fold.”
The series of four radio advertisements is set to run for another two weeks in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.
Listen to all four radio spots below:
New York Fries, ‘Fashion Kitty’
