But don’t you wish you had spokescreatures to live-tweet for your company?
Here’s what always gets my comrades and me about the Chick-fil-A cows: every CMO, at some point, says to his or her creative team (often when discussing outdoor advertising creative executions), “I don’t know, we just need ‘our’ Chick-fil-A cows.”
But they don’t mean it.
They don’t know they don’t mean it, but they would never sit still and nod throughout this entire explanation: “So, we have a new spokesman for you. It’s a little complicated, bear with me—it’s actual several spokesmen, or spokeswomen, it’s not clear because it’s actual spokes-animals, a bunch of cows who can’t spell, who are vandalizing the outdoor advertising to encourage people to eat your product because it means they themselves will not be slaughtered and turned into burgers: the more chicken they sell, the fewer of them die. And the reason they can’t spell, of course, is that they’re cows.”
“But if they’re clever enough to haul paint and ladders up to the billboard, wouldn’t they be clever enough to spell the words correctly?”
“Nope. Misspelling is how we know they’re cows.”
There are not very many branding managers who are going to believe that customers will (a) be smart enough to understand all that; (b) care enough to figure all that out; and (c) respond to a multi-year cows-only campaign which necessarily includes the introduction of important new products though there is very, very, very, very little opportunity to create “appetite appeal” with lavish food photography.
And yet, here’s America. Interacting with spokescows on social media, as if the first day the agency creatives thought of that billboard (it was surely just a one-off billboard idea that developed into an ongoing, somewhat convoluted campaign) they knew there would be a Twitter account for the cows to misspell responses to actual people.
Tweet mor chikn.
Not sure if they took this photo in advance of the live tweet, or if they’re really that on top of this “real time” social media thing. Either way, laugh out loud.
