New Orleans is a city that is known for a lot of great things—music, restaurants, literature, Mardi Gras, to name a few—but advertising isn’t something that immediately comes to mind.
Nevertheless, a New Orleans agency is where online grocer FreshDirect went when it wanted to introduce its hometown New York City public to the business it launched in July 2002.
The agency is Trumpet, which was formed in ’97 by three executives—Robbie Vitrano, creative director/copywriter; Pat McGuinness, creative director/art director; and partner Jim Gradl, who handles the account side—who were without an agency when Bauerlein, another New Orleans ad shop, folded that year.
The initial work for FreshDirect includes three cheeky TV spots that began airing earlier this year in the New York area. Unlike other online grocers that popped with the dot-com bubble, FreshDirect isn’t making a big deal about the online aspect of the business.
"Technology is part of it, but it’s not just about a dot-com," says Vitrano. "It’s not about shopping for groceries in your underwear. The campaign uses the truth that exists within the traditional supermarket model—some of the things that really don’t favor getting the best product—to create a re-evaluation by the customer. It’s all about the food."
The spots focus on that traditional supermarket model, emphasizing aspects of it that may, to say the least, turn off shoppers. For instance, in "Cheese Dust," a shopper disdainfully regards the scruffy produce clerk, who is munching on cheese curls and wiping the residue on his apron. Then she looks down at the apple she has picked out and notices that it has some distinctly cheesy fingerprints on it. The graphic: "Who’s been handling your food?" In "Olive Nose," a sneezing shopper sniffing a display of olives sucks one up her right nostril and is unable to pry it out. She looks around furtively and blows it back out into the display. The graphic: "Where’s your food been?" The third spot, "Robbery," briefly transforms the checkout guy into a holdup man in a stocking mask. All three ads direct viewers to the FreshDirect Web site with the voiceover, "Get better food at a better price."
The emphasis on food, Vitrano and McGuinness say, reflects what separates FreshDirect from famously defunct operations like WebVan.com and Kozmo.com. "These guys care about the food," McGuinness notes.
"They’ve been patient in watching what these other guys did," Vitrano adds. "Their concept really started around the same time, but they were patient about perfecting this operation. They’ve had a chance to go to school on it." Indeed, FreshDirect, which is based in Long Island City, N.Y., is slowly rolling out its delivery service in Manhattan, and plans to later bring it to other boroughs.
Brian Bain of Morrison Productions, New Orleans, directed the inaugural three spots for FreshDirect. "We did an all-nighter here at a local grocery that allowed us to get a few different looks," relates McGuinness. "We had a traditional look of a larger market and we also made it a little more intimate, to make it feel like one of the more upscale, deli-like environments."
Vitrano, who worked in a supermarket when he was 17 and says he wasn’t that far removed from that cheese-stained clerk, says the spots purposely avoided New York clichés and stereotypes. "The real issue here is not so much the New York-ness of it as it is the traditional environment that may have some flaws in it."
For now, no new spots are in the works. "There’s been a significant uptick in demand," Vitrano says. "They’re at around twelve-thousand orders a week. They’re patient and in no great hurry to over-saturate their capacity. We’ve been talking about next steps, but right now there’s no need to go out there and push it."
The Work
The agency steers about half of its TV work to local directors like Bain, McGuinness says, but he points out that it has also worked recently with Jim Jenkins of bicoastal/international hungry man, Kevin Donovan of bicoastal Bedford Falls and Maggie Zackheim of bicoastal HKM Productions.
"Usually, it’s simply the best talent we can find interested in producing the work," McGuinness says. "The critical element for an agency in creating television [commercials] that gets noticed is obviously the scripts and concepts—we take great pains to make sure our advertising has that new car smell. The casting is absolutely critical. Once the concept and casting are in place and you’ve hired a director you’re comfortable with, you just back off and let them do what they do."
Vitrano calls FreshDirect one of Trumpet’s top accounts, along with Tenet Hospitals, Cox Communications and Pan-American Life, a financial services company, all of which are regional or multi-regional in scope. Trumpet runs a service office in New York, but most of its 25 or so employees are in the home office.
The agency is "based on the creative legacy of New Orleans. It’s not so much a New Orleans style as it is an attitude and sensibility," notes Vitrano. "New Orleans is inherently creative, but also famous for its satire and irony. We draw from that culture within the applied discipline of world-class branding. We’ve tried to focus on building brands from the inside out. Our creative goes deeper into our clients’ businesses."
That approach came out in work for Pan-American Life, a 92-year-old company that had never had an agency of record until a new CEO, Jan Jobe, came on board. "They invited us in to survey every aspect of their operations," explains McGuinness. "It’s a large task aimed at getting them focused on their brand internally so you can give the people who work there something they can answer to, and use that same brief to create advertising the public can respond to."
The resulting spots, directed by Zackheim, are "kind of deliberately clumsy, but endearing," according to McGuinness, to convey a message of stability from a company that has focused on finances and insurance rather than deft advertising.
Vitrano believes Trumpet’s approach to advertising will result in steady growth. "We feel there is a huge potential for what we’re doing as an agency focused on those things that are fundamental to what smart businesses need to do to survive and innovate," he states. "It’s not about us exploding as much as it is about us building a good, solid list of clients that are very entrepreneurial."`
