It’s tough to inject creativity into retail advertising, but that’s the specialty of Barkley, Evergreen & Partners (BE&P). The Kansas City, Mo.-based agency has been proving its creative mettle on ads for national clients like Payless ShoeSource and regional clients such as Sonic Drive-Ins, a fast food chain with outlets in the Southeast and Southwest.
BE&P’s Payless campaign positions the discount retailer as a place offering shoes for every mood, with the tagline: "Shoes for whatever," with supers linking the footwear to people’s lives.
In "Easter Bunny," for example, the setting is a backyard kids’ party, where the main entertainment is a life-size, costumed Easter Bunny. A young girl races to greet the bunny, with supered text reading, "I can’t believe he’s here shoes." We also see a mother whimsically dancing with the bunny, with the super, "Like a kid again shoes."
Matthew Badger of Nocturnal Commercials, New York, directed "Easter Bunny"; Badger has helmed all but two of the Payless spots since BE&P was awarded the $80 million account in November 1999. "[Badger] was very enthusiastic about doing these spots, which are a little less retail and more brand oriented," notes Greg Meny, VP/director of broadcast production at the ad shop.
"Payless was known for having inexpensive shoes," points out Brian Brooker, president/chief creative officer. "We wanted to elevate that idea. We came up with ‘Shoes for whatever’ because they are affordable. You don’t have to wait for Easter—you can go to Payless whenever the mood strikes you. And the campaign has a lot of legs."
"A lot of legs" is a key criterion, since Payless is the agency’s second-largest broadcast client. Sonic Drive-Ins does the largest volume of broadcast, and both accounts are constantly in production, according to Meny. So far this year, BE&P has produced around 120 spots for Sonic and 30 spots for Payless.
Growth Factor
The agency is faring well, business-wise. Founded by CEO Bill Fromm as a one-man operation in ’64, the ad shop now has $338 million in billings, which represents a 300 percent increase over the past five years. The wholly employee-owned agency consists of 235 staffers/partners. BE&P’s other broadcast accounts include: Blue Bunny ice cream, Citgo, Dollar Rent A Car, Kansas Lottery, Missouri Lottery, Monroe shocks, Parade of Shoes (a division of Payless), Paramount Parks, and TOPS Markets, a grocery chain in the Northeast.
BE&P seems to be on a creative roll, which gratifies Brooker, who started his career at the agency in ’85. He left in ’89, spending the next decade as a group creative director at GSD&M, Austin, Texas. BE&P recruited Brooker in February ’00, this time as president/CCO. "I came back to Barkley because it was a much different agency," explains Brooker. "I was able to play on a much different stage. The opportunity to help shape all of the creative output was an offer I couldn’t pass up."
In assessing his impact on the creative product, Brooker observes, "I think I’m tougher on the work. The creative bar is higher. And there’s a real passion on the creative floor and within the agency as a whole to do great creative."
BE&P has been turning out strong work for Sonic, whose ad campaign is tied to different monthly promotions. Whereas past commercials had relied heavily on the chain’s carhops to tell the story, Brooker says that recent spots have moved away from the drive-in setting, thus expanding the creative possibilities. One such ad, "Super-Strength Straw," directed by Mark Raymon Bennett of bicoastal Cohn+Company, conveys the thick consistency of Sonic’s cream pie shake by focusing on the industrial-strength straw needed to consume it. Bennett also helmed the Sonic spots "Get in Shape for Summer" and "Sonic Nights."
The agency is adept at making the most from limited resources, notes Meny, who heads a broadcast production department that includes four staff producers. Of BE&P’s clients, Payless and Sonic typically have the largest budgets: Sonic spots average $250,000, while Payless budgets are around $230,000. And having observed many clients cutting ad spending, Meny expects the budgets to drop this year.
The Kansas City market has no commercial production companies with staff directors, so BE&P—which maintains a workload that’s 85 percent broadcast—must look outside the area. In the last six months, the agency has used directors such as Gary Weis of Cognito Films, Culver City, Calif., who helmed "Passion" and "Indulgence" for Blue Bunny; Clay Staub of The Partners’ Film Co., Toronto, who directed "Produce" and "Meat" for TOPS; and Eden Tyler of bicoastal Zooma Zooma, who helmed "Pedicure" for Parade of Shoes.
BE&P also works regularly with Paddock O’Farrell Productions and Gitchigumi Films—two Kansas City-based production companies that maintain reciprocal agreements with national production houses and work with their directors on a loan-out basis. Paddock O’Farrell has agreements with Cohn+Company—which provided the aforementioned Bennett—and Crossroads Film, bicoastal and Chicago. Gitchigumi has deals with Backyard Productions, Santa Monica, and Porter Film Company (now Tombo), Hollywood, among others, to rep their directors for Kansas City-originated jobs.
"The benefit is that we have a hometown company we can use if we’re shooting here," says Meny, adding that this is particularly important for lottery accounts.
The agency does work with area suppliers in addition to national vendors. BE&P uses local post houses 40 percent of the time, with the other 60 percent facilities in Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles. BE&P tapped Kansas City-based design/ effects house MK12, for example, to produce the spot "Stomach" for Paramount Parks’ HyperSonic XLC ride. Brooker recalls that particular job as being duly challenged—namely, it had: "no time, no money and the ride wasn’t up yet."
Given a $70,000 budget, BE&P came up with the idea of trying to capture the experience of getting on a scary ride. MK12 devised the execution, and created a series of clear transparencies imprinted with different parts of the human anatomy. In the decidedly low-tech spot, a hand is seen flipping the transparencies over one by one, to create an overlapped image revealing the positions of all the internal organs—including the stomach, which appears to be located in the throat.
Noting that Brooker prefers straightforward ideas such as these, Meny states, "Most of our successful spots are fairly simple executions; they work and you get the message."
