The third year of Hellmann’s “real food” marketing campaign has stepped away from the garden and towards YouTube with a three-minute “mini-documentary” about food imports.
In May, the Unilever-owned mayonnaise brand launched a short animated film conceived by its agency of record Ogilvy & Mather.
The spot promotes eating local “real” foods such as fruits and vegetables with statistics on Canada’s produce imports.
It opens with a dinner table set for a large meal, with a voiceover asking “Looks like a typical Canadian family dinner, but do you know how much of it is actually Canadian?”
The food on the table then moves around to accommodate charts and graphics detailing facts such as 53% of all Canada’s vegetables are imported, and while the population has grown only 15% in 15 years, its food imports increased 160%.
“This impacts far more than your dinner,” the voiceover continues. “It impacts the economy, our environment and our neighbourhoods.”
“The brand put a stake in the ground for championing real food three years ago,” said Nancy Vonk, co-chief creative officer at Ogilvy. “This year we asked what the barriers were to eating real food. The truth that nobody thinks about all that much is that [Canada] is buying more and more imported foods.”
At press time, the film had 58,000 views on YouTube.
Steve Gordon directed it with production by Toronto studios Crush and Sons & Daughters. Music was provided by Pirate.
The video can also be found at EatRealEatLocal.ca, a support site designed by Toronto digital agency Dashboard to provide more information on local produce, help connect shoppers with grocers selling local products, and provide social media tools to let visitors spread the word.
Segal Communications, meanwhile, is taking the campaign in-store with coupon and discount programs with local food retailers, helping Hellmann’s consumers pay less for Canadian produce.
The mini-documentary is actually the second step of this year’s campaign. Harbinger, one of Unilever’s public relations agencies, commissioned a Harris-Decima study on consumer attitudes towards eating locally in March.
The “Real Food Survey” reported that 86% of Canadians “indicate that they prefer to eat locally sourced foods,” and “six out of 10 Canadians say that they eat more locally sourced food today than they did just two years ago.”
According to Forest Kenney, senior consultant and media advisor at Harbinger, that study’s findings, released in May, have driven most of the 20.7 million media impressions the campaign has tracked so far.
In 2007, Unilever began its “real food” campaign by putting urban dwellers closer to their veggies with specially created downtown gardens bearing the Hellmann’s brand mark.
That effort continued into 2008 as a partnership with Evergreen, a not-for-profit urban improvement organization, but the branded gardens have been discontinued this year. However, Unilever still makes donations to Evergreen.
