Who says that good advertising doesn’t work? Earlier this year our friends at Gabriel deGrood Bendt came in to the recording studio to produce a few radio ads for their new client, Gold ‘n Plump Chicken. The strategy for this campaign was to showcase that Gold n’ Plump is a premium brand that uses only locally raised chickens from family farmers right here in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
One of the radio spots that we helped to record and produce featured a tongue-in-cheek protest song aping the folksy airs of Arlo & Woodie Guthrie. The tune, penned and played by GdB writer Jeff Schuller, was sung by Minneapolis voice-over talent and actor Kevin Dewey. We featured it here, (middle of the page) in our May Babble-Blog.
While it’s no “Alice’s Restaurant” – it is raising awareness.
Kevin Dewey – A Man Of Pride, Passion & Poultry.
“We work hard to raise the best, freshest chicken we can for Wisconsin families to enjoy. But the corporate guys have a lot of muscle and they’re trucking in more and more chicken from out of state. That’s bad news for fresh local chicken and bad news for our local economy.” That quote comes from Joe Bragger of the Bragger Family Farm of Independence, WI. who’s a supporter of the fight back campaign: Tell Corporate Chicken Get Stuffed.
The movement has taken on even more inertia with a website that features info on the local chicken cause, places to buy Gold ‘n Plump, a downloadable letter, and a video of Kevin flailing away at a guitar – lip synching to an updated version of the song we originally laid down in Recording Studio A this Spring.
The radio campaign got updated this past week with fresh performances from both Jeff and Kevin. The audio post production hook for this radio ad was to put Kevin in a coffeehouse – something like the Haight-Ashbury of Eau Claire.
Or, any Starbucks in Madison.
We got a great live feel by recording the guitar with a couple of Neumann TLM 103’s setup with the “3 to1” rule. This kept the sound open, in phase, but still real. Some chimey EQ and a touch of club reverb rounded out the guitars and vocals. While an even wetter ‘verb would’ve helped the sound-design seem more true – there was too much of a risk of losing Kevin’s voice on the radio. Sculpting the sound-design was its own fork in the road since, on a whim, we just started dropping in yelps, chants and hand claps to see if we could create a rallying cry from the audience. We loved what we got and kept it in.
This is the latest version of “Protest” for Gold ‘n Plump Chicken from Gabriel deGrood Bendt.
Kevin Dewey can be booked through his Minneapolis voice-over agent, Wehmann Models and Talent, Inc. You can catch up with Jeff Schuller on the club scene with his band, U-Joint.
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