Campbell's generated sales during the holiday season with an emotional, diverse long-form video.
Approximately 42 percent of Campbell's Condensed annual national sales occur during the crucial eight-week holiday window (November 1st through December 31st). Campbell's needed an emotionally and seasonally relevant way to connect with consumers and establish itself as the preferred choice for their holiday cooking creations.
This led to Campbell's strategic objective: Increase sales among younger millennial families with a key retail partner. The brand leveraged retail sales data to measure the campaign's effectiveness and its ability to reach new buyers.
Campbell's role in consumers' lives is to create comfort in moments of chaos. Starting in 2019, the brand gave consumers something they didn't know they needed: JOMO, or joy of missing out from the holiday chaos, and permission to enjoy moments of togetherness at home with family and friends. This launched Campbell's "Joy Night In" campaign — a media-to-shelf program undertaken in partnership with holiday entertainment properties centered around holiday movies and Campbell's side dishes.
In 2023, Campbell's evolved its program name to "Joy Nights In" (plural) to signal consumers making up lost time with more and larger celebrations, prompting more occasions to make more Campbell's side dishes. The strategy also evolved from distinct media tactics to a focused, emotional narrative rooted in the warmth of the season as people opened their homes to more gatherings.
While already established among gen X and baby boomers, Campbell's needed to win over younger households for sustained future growth. To do this, Campbell's needed to improve perception with multicultural audiences with which Campbell's was underrepresented.
American family structures have shifted over the last few decades and especially for millennials. Family structures reflect various arrangements: single families with no kids, families with just dogs, same-sex, and single-parent families. Understanding and representing a modern family dynamic was important for Campbell's to gain credibility with this audience.
Campbell's brought creative and media strategies together across three pillars as it:
To drive relevance through the comfort of spending holiday nights at home, the brand and its agency partner Spark Foundry reflected Campbell's as more than just a soup brand and highlighted the fact that cooking Campbell's side dishes and sharing mealtime moments sparked long-lasting family traditions.
To bring this vision to life, Campbell's sought out the right holiday network partner with creative expertise whose storytelling would resonate with its audience, positioning Campbell's around a key holiday ritual: holiday movies. Unlike previous campaigns, the Campbell's campaign's emotional creative needed a longer format than a traditional 15-, 30-, or 60-second video. The campaign's six-minute-and-30-second video, "Spoonful of Joy," became the centerpiece for Campbell's Joy Nights In campaign. It launched during the talent's, Tatyana Ali, network movie premiere and was later uploaded to YouTube.
A month before the full six-minute-and-30-second commercial release, a teaser trailer was launched on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, igniting social conversation. Supporting assets from actors Tatyana Ali, Buddy Valestro, and Shannon Doherty featured their favorite family holiday side dishes with Campbell's. Recipe assets and personal stories from the talent were also shared on their social media channels, supporting the 360-degree campaign.
Diversity was prioritized in talent casting to showcase togetherness across various ethnicities and increase Campbell's relatability to diverse audiences. For example, Campbell's took the necessary steps to authentically represent the neurodivergent community. Its priority was to include neurodivergent talent as Spoonful of Joy became a platform that represented a community, not typically integrated in the kitchen.
Amid national economic uncertainty in 2022, the category's landscape shifted and competition from private labels became a significant threat. Faced with this challenge and evolving holiday behaviors, Campbell's needed to secure its place on holiday grocery lists by re-engaging its core audience (gen X and baby boomers) while seeking ways to drive relevance with millennials for sustained future growth.
Campbell's Spoonful of Joy campaign positively shifted brand perception and achieved its goal of promoting the holiday relevance of the Campbell's brand.
