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Company: Ball Park Agency: MWW Time frame: October 2012 - February 2013
The Ball Park brand dates back to 1957, when it debuted as the official hotdog of the Detroit Tigers. For more than 50 years, the "Ball Park Frank" has been synonymous with both the Tigers and supermarket aisles across the country. So when Ball Park in late 2012 entered the frozen-burger category via the launch of fully cooked flame broiled patties, it decided to swing for the fences, PR-wise. Ball Park, which is owned by The Hillshire Brands Co., called on its longtime PR agency MWW to create a PR campaign that would leverage the brand's equity and carve a new niche among both sports fans and food shoppers.
The campaign, titled "Burgers Across America," featured celebrity spokespeople, consumer marketing efforts and social media, along with a healthy dollop of regional pride.
Joe Cohen, senior VP within MWW's consumer marketing practice of MWW, said the campaign was able to effectively combine "paid, earned and owned" media, or P/E/O, which is an increasingly prominent element of marketing communications.
In this case, paid media was a Facebook ad buy as part of the overall campaign; owned media was Ball Park's branded content while the earned portion was generated from media coverage of the campaign.
THE OBJECTIVES
Ball Park's PR campaign had two main objectives:
- Create top-of-mind awareness about Ball Park Flame Grilled Patties among traditional consumers and boost consumer trials of the new product line.
- Reinforce the notion that Ball Park products are the "perfect guy food," in terms of brand positioning.
Because it was its first product line extension ever, Ball Park wanted to make a big splash with consumers, many of whom are increasingly patched into Facebook.
In October 2012 Ball Park teamed up with pro football legends Deion Sanders, Jason Taylor and Tony Siragusa to launch the company's "Burgers Across America" Facebook contest.
The Facebook page--which featured burger recipes from the trio of football legends--was designed to get consumers' competitive juices flowing by encouraging them to share how they top Ball Park Flame Grilled Patties using their favorite...