Category: Titanium and Integrated
Advertiser: SMITH & WOLLENSKY
Product/Service: STEAKHOUSE
Agency: WALRUS
Chief Creative Officer: Deacon Webster (Walrus)
Art Director: Jillian Dresser (Walrus)
Copywriter: Mike Lee (Walrus)
Developer: Emily Van Tassel (Walrus)
Producer: Jason Heller (Walrus)
Media placement: Signage - On the restaurant - September 15
Media placement: Website - Online - September 15
Media placement: napkins, steakknives, matches, - In the restaurant - September 15
Media placement: Newspaper ad - Newspaper - September 15
Media placement: banners - New York Sites - September 15
Describe the campaign/entry
With steakhouses proliferating throughout New York, they wanted to give people a taste of what it would be like if they made Smith & Wollensky their regular steakhouse.
Describe how the campaign/entry was launched across each channel in the order of implementation
2 weeks before we started changing the names we replaced the name 'smith' on the building, awnings etc. with a blank space indicated by a line. That day we launched a full page ad in the New York Times announcing the promotion. Banners on local sites directed traffic to the pledge site which also launched that day. People were required to agree to the 'pledge' and book a table during October. We then began picking names at random based on their reservation date. Starting October 1st we began changing the name of the restaurant everywhere, on the building, the awning, the matchbooks, the steak-knives, the napkins - they even answered the phone differently. When the person who had won that day showed up, they were treated literally like they owned the place. We did this every day for the entire month of October.
Give some idea of how successful this campaign/entry was with both client and consumer
Entries alone generated over $200,000 worth of steak dinners. The site saw 35,000 visits in the month of October - a massive amount for a single location restaurant. The promotion was picked up by national news outlets like the New York Times as well as TV networks like Fox Business News. All the local restaurant blogs picked it up and on top of it all the name change was seen by the hundreds of thousands of people who drove by the restaurant on 3rd avenue every day - which generated thousands of tweets and search queries.