Pasta sauce brand Classico wants customers to know it’s cool with being second best.
A new TV commercial features a group of nonna’s celebrating their win for best-tasting sauce. The head-nodding spot is set to the track “All I Do is Win” by DJ Khaled and T-Pain, and shows the nonnas spraying champagne and dancing in slow motion. Meanwhile, the second-place team from Classico approvingly cheers on the winners.
The message is that homemade pasta sauce will always win, but Classico is a close second.
In research, the brand learned its target consumer regularly makes homemade pasta sauce on the weekends and believes no store-bought pasta sauce can live up to something made from scratch, said Jenna Zylber, senior brand manager at Kraft Heinz, which owns Classico.
“But we also learned that no one has time to make homemade sauce during the week, and despite being tired and strapped for time at the end of the day, our target still held their meals to a really high standard.”
That insight led to the new “Second Only to Yours” creative platform. The idea is that “for those nights when [consumers] want to deliver a great meal, but don’t have a lot of time, Classico is the perfect solution,” said Zylber.
Classico’s previous positioning emphasized Italy and its role in inspiring the brand’s recipes. “But we haven’t launched a fully integrated campaign in over a decade, so for many consumers we probably didn’t stand for much of anything beyond being a delicious pasta sauce,” said Zylber.
“When we began creative development, we spent a lot of time looking at the work that had already been done in the category,” she added. “What we discovered was that a lot of it was really consistent both in terms of messaging and tonality. We knew our messaging needed to break through the clutter so we opted for a tone and feel that we hope will do exactly that.”
The campaign was created by Taxi and is the agency’s first work for the brand after becoming agency of record in January. (Taxi has worked with a number of Kraft brands over the years.) Fifteen and 30-second spots are airing nationally across specialty and conventional networks, accompanied by online banners and targeted social media posts.
The effort is running through the rest of the year. Starcom handled the media buy.
