Campaign Trail is our analysis of some of the best new creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns in the archives here.
First launched nearly 40 years ago to boost sales, Sheetz's "Made To Order" menu has become the signature offering of the convenience store chain, which has hundreds of locations across the mid-Atlantic region. Consumers love the chain's approach to customizing food orders, helping Sheetz build a loyal customer base that the brand lovingly refers to as "Freakz."
Sheetz is celebrating those dialed-in consumers and their id-fueled inner voices in its latest campaign. Central to "Sheetz Freakz," which includes out-of-home ads, interactive social media filters and other elements, are four 30-second TV spots that pair consumers with self-styled puppet versions of their inner Freakz — a red plushie that falls somewhere between Taz from "Looney Tunes" and Animal from "The Muppets."
The spots follow a similar pattern: the introduction of a scenario (a couple settling in to stream their favorite show, for example), a "Feed Your Inner Sheetz Freak" title card, a humorous insight (what happens when someone "cheats" on their partner and watches ahead?), a rapid-fire, quick-cut montage of customized food and quick convenience and the campaign's "Why The Sheetz Not" tagline.
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"This campaign is rooted in strategy," said Tammy Dunkley, Sheetz's director of brand design. "Being able to get what they want, how they want it and when they want it is this feeling of liberation: 'I do not have to settle, that's why I go there. That's why I choose Sheetz over the next guy — because they fulfill my needs better than anybody else.'
"[Our consumers] have an undying love for the brand, so we created this little character to represent your inner Freak," the executive continued. "Everybody's needs are a little bit different, but we all have a commonality and love for the brand: Go ahead and listen to the things that [your Freak] wants you to do, go above and beyond, live life on the edge, put mozzarella sticks on your burger, go ahead, 'Why the Sheetz Not'?"
Bringing Freakz to life
The star of the "Sheetz Freakz" ads are the Freakz themselves: balls of red fur that share physical aspects of their respective humans, from hair to clothing to accessories. Creating physical manifestations of consumers' inner voices lets Sheetz explore its brand values around humor and shared humanity.
"We wanted the Freak to have the brand's attitude built-in: the way he acts, the way he moves, the sounds he makes or doesn't make. It was all carefully curated to be this perfect little representation of that," Dunkley said.
Sheetz opted to have physical puppets rather than the polished CGI of other brand mascots, keying in on campy, simplistic humor that is true to the brand's voice.
"It's very endearing when you see it, 'oh, that's cool, that's fun,’ but also, it's adorable," said Nicole Auman, Sheetz's director of brand marketing. "We all have this little thing inside of us that's driving us, and to see it brought to life like that is a really fun way to tell the story."
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To tell those stories in ads, the brand focused on research-driven insights about consumers' key occasions, products and ordering channels as a starting point for featured scenarios like a tradition of eating loaded nachos for game night, getting sandwich delivery for streaming-and-chilling and grabbing bags of fries while fueling the car.
"As we were marrying those use cases and how people typically engage with us, we layered on those human truths — those funny little moments that [consumers] can relate to above and beyond Sheetz itself," Auman said.
The ads, created with agency Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners, fit a lot of content and humor into 30 seconds, including two taglines, a storyline and a flurry of food and delivery images cut together through the type of "hip hop montages" popularized by directors like Darren Aronofsky and Edgar Wright. In one of the spots, a woman's Freak imagines a wild "Thelma & Louise"-styled road trip before the woman calls off the explosive adventure.
"The agency did a really wonderful job of taking 30 seconds to tell that story and doing it effectively," Dunkley said. "When you're trying to put that much into a spot, it really takes the knowledge of what are the right moments so that at the end of the day, the person takes away what you want them to."
Landing the joke
The Sheetz brand name and its Freakz characters lend themselves to some humor that could be a bit too raunchy for some brands, like the "freak in the Sheetz" language the brand has sometimes adopted, to say nothing of the sometimes negative connotation of the word "freak."
"We found that it was important to continue to be edgy and that we don't want to be raunchy, we don't want to be over the top and getting laughs just for the sake of getting the laughs — we want it to be purposeful," Auman said. "We never want to put our brand in a bad light, but we felt like these risks are really worth it, because [the Freakz] are just a little bit mischievous — they're not over the top."
As comedy evolves, so does how brands can use humor to reach consumers. For Sheetz, it is important to be inclusive and bring people in on the joke, rather than being insulting in any way. Humor in marketing has seen an upswing since the dour, serious tones that dominated ads in the early days of the pandemic.
"The world's ready for laughter again after all of the hard times we've been through," Dunkley explained. "How do we leverage that and make sure that we understand our customers to the point that we can have some fun with the human truths that we understand about their everyday lives?"
