Chicken wings to the crib? Not any more

The power of advertising, eh? As my household will attest, one of the few TV commercials to get me animated over the last year since I moved in has been the Just Eat ad featuring Snoop Dogg. Now, I'd never hitherto given much attention to either Snoop or his music or, for that matter, hip-hop, but here I have been, involuntarily rocking along to the rapper expounding on his preferred home deliveries, namely...ahem...“Chicken wings to the crib,” “Tacos to the chateau” and “Chocolate fondue right on cue,” although I don't know which of the home delivery companies would bring that last item to your door.

The ad has become something of an obsession, to the extent that my girlfriend has agreed to it being played at my funeral, whenever that might happen (on an as-yet compiled playlist that should include Bowie's Heroes and Blue Öyster Cult's (Don't Fear) The Reaper, FYI), with the ancillary instruction that everyone in the congregation joins in with the ad's strapline, “Did somebody say Just Eat?”.

But now word reaches me that the spot is no more, and Just Eat is casting its net for an ad agency to dish up a new campaign for the brand. According to the advertising trade magazine Campaign, Just Eat has put their account up for grabs, with the agencies TBWA\London, Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Adam & Eve/DDB all reportedly pitching for the business, along with incumbent McCann London, who came up with the Snoop Dogg ad. The commercial, which made its debut last summer, was named by Campaign as one of its ads of 2020. In its citation, the magazine wrote that it was “pure, silly fun”, and Snoop's remix of the Just Eat jingle - which also works in the words “oodles of noodles” - leaves the viewer unable to watch “without nodding their head and singing along”. Yep, guilty as charged. 

Moreover, the Doggfather campaign (and its Christmas sequel featuring an all-puppet cast), proved to be a beneficially perfect storm for Just Eat, which tapped into the 387% increase in UK home deliveries during 2020’s lockdowns. So, if the rumours are correct, and the company paid Dogg £5.3 million for his services, the company will have seen a major return on their investment. A shame, then, to see the campaign end. It was silly and fun, but also brilliantly executed. And hats off, too, to the Dogg Man himself for not taking himself too seriously.

Celebrities have, though, been taking the corporate coin to shill for advertisers for decades. In fact, one of the earliest examples was Mark Twain, in the early years of the 20th Century, promoting pens with his name on them. Most celebrity endorsements have been of the straightforward “Hi. I'm X, and I endorse this product” variety, but there has been a shift towards the less serious. The Cinzano commercials with Joan Collins and Leonard Rossiter in the 1970s come immediately to mind.

But of the plethora of stars sending themselves up in return for, presumably, a juicy cheque, arguably the most baffling are the appearances of Robert De Niro - perhaps the greatest film actor of his generation - flogging cars and baked goods for laughs. In the last year we’ve seen the 76-year-old appear as “a trendy version of De Niro” in an ad for South Korean motor manufacturer Kia and its somewhat uninspiring electric model, the Niro (geddit?). Campaign magazine was less impressed, running the headline “Turkey of the Week: Robert De Niro's star power is wasted in Kia's ads,” concluding that enlisting a heavyweight actor like De Niro resulted in “very little reward” for the Kia brand. 

However, film critics will draw attention to the fact that the star of Raging Bull, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Godfather Part 2 has veered towards more light-hearted roles in his latter years (you could say it began with Meet The Fockers in 2004), but for someone usually regarded as the ultimate Method actor, seeing him dressed in a beanie hat and braces for Kia’s commercial still took a lot of acceptance. Not, however, as deep as his ads for Warburtons, the 146-year-old family-run bakery based in Bolton, to where De Niro flew to shoot a commercial for the company’s bagels.

The construct, you might recall, is of De Niro, brazenly playing an amalgam of his various gangster characters, attempting to “discourage” Warburtons chairman Jonathan Warburton from selling their own brand bagels in favour of “Nu York” buns, with the executive believing that the screen legend is actually in his office pitching a new film. You’d be right to consider this a strong case of suspended disbelief.

Picture: Warburtons

While De Niro’s comedy ads - and especially those for Warburtons - have inevitably prompted social media wags to suspect that the actor clearly must have a heavy divorce bill on his hands (he and wife of 21 years, Grace Hightower, filed for separation in December 2018), ‘Bob’ has been fairly sanguine about the role. He told GQ that he decided to do the spots after seeing Sylvester Stallone do one for Warburtons: “Look, they asked me to do it and I met the guy, Warburton, and I thought it was funny. I saw Stallone do it and I thought at least he has a sense of humour about it and about himself. And I thought I can look at it two ways: should I think I should never have done that? I'm too good for that or something? And I said, ‘fuck it!’, I'll do it. Why not?" adding: “Don't hold it against me." 

Whatever it did or didn’t do for De Niro’s reputation, it certainly hasn’t harmed Warburtons. The ad helped the company reverse 2018 losses of more than £6 million and return it to a £11 million profit in 2019. Quite what luring De Niro to the Lancashire mill town to shoot the ad (Snoop Dogg's Just Eat spot was shot at his 'Dogg Pound' in Los Angeles) cost the company is still not known (it’s rumoured to be six figures), but the Warburtons board was able to award itself a handsome £15 million dividend on the back of their fortunes driven by the star’s turn in their ad. On top of that, there’s the sheer kudos of adding De Niro to a list of celebs that have already shilled for the bakers, including Stallone, Peter Kay and The Muppets. And, let’s face it, if people like me are still talking about it, and that’s the kind of brand power that many advertisers can only crave.