Welcome To Legal

Legal Sea Foods

About

Client
Legal Sea Foods

Year
2019

Strategy

Placements
Television
Social Media
Google Ads
Out of Home

Deliverables
Video
Display
Search
Illustration

Challenge

How do we get a new audience to feel welcome at an old, established restaurant?

The year is 2019, weed is legal in Massachusetts and the restaurant just so happens to include the name ‘Legal’. This is the inspiration behind the Welcome to Legal campaign where we were able to drive sales and increase awareness by inserting a classic brand into the mainstream culture of today.

How We Did It

The Welcome to Legal campaign was a fully integrated effort that used traditional and digital media strategies and tactics to engage and welcome a new underserved audience emerging from the growing cannabis culture in Massachusetts. We were inspired by weed being legal and our name literally being “Legal.” It’s that simple and that obvious. Once we put that together the idea just flowed from there.

Campaign Overview

Campaign Targeting

Details

We created an integrated campaign to build excitement, news, passion, and create new customer relationships. Our budgets are always modest, but we had a few things going for us. One is that when people heard the idea, they just wanted to be part of it. We had great partners, especially in music and in the poster designs. And two, fish are kind of inherently psychedelic. Just look at them. We are still a family restaurant, so we couldn’t go too overboard with the concept. That’s why we chose a certain “dad humor” voice. It had to be funny and accessible to all.

Audiences were introduced to the campaign through :30s TV and OOH that featured funny fish puns overlaying psychedelic creative elements. Digital efforts leveraged relationships with multiple location-based advertising partners to develop an audience targeting pool that most closely associated with the culture to ensure digital ads were served to an appropriate audience where they would resonate. Our audience was carefully selected through a series of key targeting parameters that identified dispensary/headshop visitors and those that displayed cannabis related online behavior; whether that be visiting cannabis related sites or searching for content like Snoop Dogg or Bob Marley. We strategically served TV and digital display advertising at 4:20 to align with the culture even further. The time 4:20 also happens to be the perfect time to make dinner plans.

Guerilla tactics were also used to create more buzz around the community. Legal Sea Foods hosted a “happier hour” that started at 4:20pm. We made custom t-shirts that featured a group a fish designed together to form a marijuana leaf. We partnered with local Massachusetts dispensaries that gave us the opportunity to park our Chowda Van food truck outside dispensary locations and serve up fresh clam chowder to dispensary patrons; while wearing and distributing the t-shirts. We partnered with ImprovBoston to send comedians dressed as lobsters to the dispensaries as if they were just another customer. These strategies help bring our message to the streets and make a deeper connection with this new audience.