One thing’s been taking place in promoting for some time now, and the brand new Domino’s marketing campaign is an effective second to look at it truthfully. Absurdism—correct, dedicated, logic-free absurdism—has quietly grow to be the default register for a good portion of mainstream inventive work.
Outdated Spice confirmed {that a} man on a horse delivering non-sequiturs might shift product quicker than any rational profit declare. Examine the Market constructed an empire on meerkats. Cereal model Surreal grew a cult following by deadpan OOH copy that refused to clarify itself. And now Domino’s is summoning Mexican wrestlers into individuals’s residing rooms.
So the query is: does this signify real inventive considering? Or has the trade merely discovered a dependable trick solely to run it into the bottom? The reply, within the case of CHICK ‘N’ DIP a minimum of, is extra fascinating than both choice suggests.
Including character
Domino’s new hen idea launches throughout almost 1,400 UK shops, with a marketing campaign from VCCP that includes boneless bites, wings and tenders alongside 9 globally impressed dips. The temporary was to make the launch really feel as quick and energetic because the product itself. The reply, developed by VCCP creatives Adam Jackson and Ted Worth, was to provide every dip its personal summoned character.
Ask for the Mexican Mayo to be handed over, and you will find your self sharing your couch with a pair of Mexican wrestlers. Attain for the Ghost Chilli Dip, and a ghostly organist seems behind a flame-throwing organ. The Katsu Curry Dip produces a somersaulting samurai cat. The Buffalo Sizzling Dip: a charging buffalo.
It’s, on the floor, precisely the form of marketing campaign the trade now produces with dependable regularity. Surreal situation. Heightened home setting. Creatures and characters that don’t have any enterprise being the place they’re. Understanding wink to the viewers. The template is acquainted sufficient that you might virtually set your watch by it.
When absurdism earns its maintain
The extra helpful query, then, shouldn’t be whether or not a marketing campaign is absurdist however whether or not the absurdism is doing actual work. And right here, I would argue, it’s.
Dips are, by their nature, a sensory proposition: they’re about flavour depth, in regards to the expertise of tasting one thing surprising. That is genuinely onerous to speak in a 30-second movie with out resorting to food-porn close-ups or leaning closely on voice-over. Characters sidestep the issue fully by externalising the feeling. You needn’t present what Katsu Curry tastes like if a samurai cat can present up and embody it.
There’s additionally a memorability logic at work that goes past mere leisure. 9 dips is a variety of product data for a client to carry. 9 distinct characters give every dip a hook {that a} flavour description alone could not present. The inventive work is doing the job of the menu, and that is not a trivial achievement.
The sub-brand downside
There is a structural problem underpinning all of this that the absurdist floor can obscure. Launching a sub-concept below a dominant model is likely one of the trickier issues you’ll be able to ask a inventive company to do. Do too little and the brand new factor disappears into the father or mother model’s shadow. Do an excessive amount of, and also you dilute the fairness that made the father or mother model price extending.
Advertising and marketing director Harry Dromey is candid about what’s at stake: “The Domino’s identify brings an enormous quantity of fame, credibility and love,” he says. “Launching CHICK ‘N’ DIP with its personal distinct identification will increase visibility and relevance for Domino’s in one of many fastest-growing meals classes.”
The characters are the answer to that downside. They offer CHICK ‘N’ DIP sufficient identification to really feel like its personal factor, with out requiring the marketing campaign to construct a wholly new model from scratch.
Individually, the CHICK ‘N’ DIP visible identification was developed by Domino’s in-house inventive division, Huge Dip Studio, drawing on world journey and street-food tradition. It is a smart structural resolution that provides the sub-brand its personal visible world, and lets the marketing campaign deal with character reasonably than establishing credentials.
Is it an addition?
So is promoting hooked on absurdism? Most likely, in the identical method, it was as soon as hooked on emotional storytelling, and earlier than that to movie star endorsement, and earlier than that to rational profit claims. Traits in inventive work are actual, and the trade does generally tend to chase what’s working till it stops working.
The chance with absurdism, as with all register, is that familiarity breeds not contempt however invisibility; that the buffalo stops being stunning as a result of there’s all the time a buffalo someplace.
What saves one of the best of this work, and what saves CHICK ‘N’ DIP, is that the strangeness is restricted reasonably than generic. These aren’t random creatures deployed for chaos. They’re exact solutions to express inventive issues, and the craft seen within the execution—the dedication, the element, the deadpan home framing—is what separates them from the merely bizarre.
Harry describes the logic merely: “Now not will households be torn aside or marriages finish by arguments over whether or not to order hen or pizza. You may have each, delivered in 25 minutes.”
And to my thoughts, when the narrative is that clear, a charging buffalo stops feeling like a pattern and begins feeling like a solution.
