Editing Noggles Love Emerald Nuts

During the postseason baseball games, the commercials have tended to be dry and highly repetitious. Not so for the Emerald Nuts commercials, each of which has made me at least giggle. First there was the Egomaniacal Normans, and I was hooked from there.

So I finally found the product at the grocery store. We Noggles are nut consumers, especially on salads, so I picked up some cashews, since we already have quite a stash of both pecans and walnuts. Mmm, cashews.

Slate seems to agree with me about the Emerald Nut mania.

There's no better way to make us remember a name than to shape the entire campaign around the name itself. Each ad hammers home "E.N." for "Emerald Nuts." I can't think of a campaign more likely to "get credit" for its spots—the mnemonic ensures that we'll never forget which product these ads are for.

And the ads themselves are goofy and appealing. My favorites: "Elegant Naysayers" (a teenager wears a frilly, aristocratic costume—and hates everything) and "Evil Navigators" (a guy in the passenger's seat gives directions from a map ... and then calmly spins his head 360 degrees, a la The Exorcist, before grabbing a handful of nuts from a jar on the dashboard).

But the true genius here isn't the content of the ads. It's the length, the abundance, and the careful scheduling of the ads. According to Diamond's vice president of marketing, Sandy McBride, once the "E.N." idea was settled on, everything else fell into place. They decided to run a whole lot of 15-second ads instead of a few 30-second ones. In part this was because the joke is so simple, it can't fill even 30 seconds of airtime. But Diamond also knew that, with a limited budget, it would get much more bang for its buck. There are 15 different spots in the campaign right now. (McBride says they shot them all together, in three days.) The diversity helps prevent ad fatigue, where we've seen the same spot so many times that we tune it out.

Kudos Emerald Nuts (and Diamond). You've inspired a consumer. Your product is tasty, too!

Update: If you haven't seen 'em, the commercials are on the Emerald Nuts site.

hln

Posted by hln at October 27, 2004 06:57 PM | Whimsy | TrackBack