Campaign: The Neal McCoy
Agency: Frankel, Chicago
Client: Fleetwood Homes, Riverside, CA
Country singer Neal McCoy is a real cut-up. He makes a pretty good cut-out, too.
McCoy was the centerpiece — both literally and figuratively — of a campaign Frankel’s Irvine, CA, office created for Fleetwood Homes after research found that 75 percent of the company’s customers ranked country music as their favorite form of entertainment.
After identifying McCoy as a good fit because of both his affable personality and his asking price, Frankel’s creatives — who weren’t familiar with McCoy or his music — flew out to meet him. “We came away with the overriding feeling that we had to capture his sense of humor,” says senior vp-executive creative director Erin Kociela. “We wanted to express his quirkiness — without being heavy-handed.”
One TV spot had McCoy sitting on his front porch, waiting to entertain anyone and anything that passed by; the other had him interacting with his own standee. The singer proved to be extremely accommodating, and even ad-libbed one of the best lines (“Are you going to eat that?” he asks the standee.) Radio spots carried the same humorous tone.
The advertising was just one component of a broad, four-month campaign that leveraged McCoy’s summer tour and the release of his latest recording, 24-7-365. Coded gamepieces handed out at concerts directed fans to retailers to see if they’d won a Fleetwood home. Sweeps entry forms were inserted into the new CD. Retailers gave away CD samplers to customers who toured homes and hosted a sweeps offering a private McCoy concert. Radio merchandising, P-O-P, and other concert activity supported the effort.
Calls to Fleetwood’s toll-free hotline tripled, retail traffic and sales increased, more retailers joined Fleetwood’s Pinnacle sales program, and the company regained the market-leader status it had lost at the end of 1999. On the personal-fulfillment side, McCoy was so impressed with Frankel’s work that he commissioned a song for 24-7-365 named after the on-site game (“Key to Your Heart”) and had associate creative director Leighton Hubble design the CD cover.
McCoy “was awesome,” says JoAnne Foist, Fleetwood’s marketing services manager. “We had customers come in and say they were buying a home because Neal told them to.”
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