Note From Tongal: “Do Your Worst” is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tell Us About It Tongal Blog Project. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
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For the best ideas and videos, Tongal is the place to go, right? While that’s normally true, just for today, let’s try something a little different. For this blog post, I challenged three of Tongal’s most esteemed Ideators: Ervin Anderson, Federico Fracchia, and Caleb Van Voorhis, to a friendly, little competition. Temporarily abandoning their normally decent creative palettes, each of these Tongal titans were tasked with coming up with the most awesomely bad promotional concepts imaginable, based on the same faux mystery-sponsored brief posted below.
The Brief:
Synopsis
A once-popular brand of canned pasta is looking for some inventive promotional campaigns meant to appeal to grown millennials.
Background
Canned Pasta: It’s a fun, fast and filling meal that tends to be popular among young children. However, once they get older, these very same kids have a tendency to lose interest. Well, this
Mystery Sponsor is ready-spaghetti to widen their target audience. To do this, they need you, Tongalers, to come up with a unique and wild Promotional Campaign that will convince all millennials that the Mystery Sponsor’s canned pasta belongs in their hip, cool microwaves. These concepts can take many forms including video, social media campaigns, as well as live activations. The Mystery Sponsor is also very open to the idea of celebrity endorsements.
Objectives
The goal of this project is to create an attention-grabbing Promotional Campaign (500 characters or less) that will convince millennials that the Mystery Sponsor’s canned pasta is the perfect meal for them, at any age.
Key Marketing Messages
You’re never too old to enjoy microwaveable, canned pasta.
Target Audience
Moderate-income; people born between 1982 and 2004.
Exposure
Anything from YouTube to the Super Bowl.
Now, let’s find out which of these Ideators did the best... I, mean, worst... I mean, did what they were supposed to.
1. ERVIN ANDERSON
It’s All About the Can!
What’s the first word in canned pasta? Can! Well, sort of. I mean, “can” & “canned” are kind of the same word. Make our sales pitch all about the can! Go full Andy Warhol. Open The Canned Pasta Gallery, where hot young artists are given canned pasta cans and tasked with creating innovative art pieces that people will talk about. Everyone is going to want canned pasta art in their millennial, young, hip apartments or parents’ basements. And if people want to eat the pasta, well, all the better!
2. FEDERICO FRACCHIA
Safe Food
There’s one thing millennials can truly appreciate about canned pasta: It’s not controversial. Millennials love political correctness, so finding a food product that’s definitely not racist, sexist or culturally insensitive is key. But we won’t just highlight that our product is safe: our campaign is all about actively branding every other food product on Earth as offensive so that millennials will have to eat canned pasta for every single meal. Sure, they love avocados now... But what if they knew that money goes to Kony? (It doesn’t, but we can get some Russian hackers to get that ball rolling.)
3. CALEB VAN VOORHIS
Mystery Pasta Brewery
In attempting to lure in the millennials of this era, you can’t expect them to come to the product. You have to bring the product to them. And where is the one place where you are absolutely guaranteed to find all millennials in their natural habitat? Your local, newly opened brewery. So the first stage of this campaign is opening a Mystery Pasta Brewery! Preferably open it in Portland, Austin, or Brooklyn.
So, who won? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m leaving that up to you, the readers. Leave your vote for the worst idea in the comments below. Also, if you’re feeling especially ambitious, feel free to post your own bad canned pasta ideas, as well.
Thanks for reading and remember...
Ervin: “An idea is not an idea until it’s your idea.”
Fede: “There’s no ‘I’ in Ideation.”
Caleb: “No idea is a bad one…. It’s just a semi-semi-semi-semi finalist."
