Advertising: Campbell Bets on the Wisdom of a Child

Updates to give the decades-old characters slimmer silhouettes and more contemporary looks were met with dismay among nostalgic older consumers and shrugs from younger consumers.

In a multimedia campaign that begins this week, Campbell Soup has decided to shelve the venerable brand mascots in favor of a modern-day boy, age around 8, who advises parents on what to feed their hungry offspring.

In a nod to the Campbell Kids, the new character is named the Wisest Kid in the Whole World; in another element of continuity, the campaign keeps the longtime brand theme, “M’m! M’m! Good!”

Executives at Campbell Soup and BBDO New York, the agency creating the campaign, dismiss suggestions that the name is evocative of the Most Interesting Man in the World, the popular brand character for Dos Equis beer. Rather, they say, the young guru is meant to personify the appetite that boys and girls have for Campbell’s condensed soups, like chicken noodle and tomato, as well as remind parents that a bowl of hot soup makes an appealing alternate meal to youthful favorites like fast food and pizza.

“Who knows more about what kids like than kids?” Ed Carolan, president for United States retail at Campbell Soup in Camden, N.J., asked.

“Moms and dads still struggle with what we call the real-time dilemma at mealtime: they want to be happy about what their kids eat, but the kids have to like it,” Mr. Carolan said. “Soup is an option they’ll feel good about serving to the kids, and the kids are happy.”

Morgan Seamark, executive vice president and senior director at BBDO New York — part of the BBDO North America division of BBDO Worldwide, owned by the Omnicom Group — said: “Parents have more options than ever to feed their kids. Maybe soup fell down the list of potential things to serve. We want to remind moms and dads that kids love Campbell’s soups. If you want to know what kids really like, don’t guess or make an assumption; ask a kid, and not just any kid, ask the Wisest Kid in the Whole World.”

The character is appearing in commercials along with print and online ads and will be featured on an app and at events. He will also have a presence in social media like blogs, Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter.

In addition to peddling what Campbell Soup calls its eating soups — heritage products like chicken noodle and newcomers like three soups with Super Mario Brothers shapes (“Achieve many levels of deliciousness,” the Wisest Kid says) — the character appears in ads with recipes for cooking soups like cream of mushroom; in one ad, for potpies made with cream of chicken soup, he asks, “What is the sound of one mouth watering?”

Plans call for the ads to be the largest single campaign within a category of Campbell Soup business lines known as U.S. soup and simple meals. The company spent $200.9 million last year on ads for soup in major media, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, compared with $229.9 million in 2011; those figures include spending on other soups in addition to condensed, among them ready-to-serve.

In the 2014 fiscal year, which began on July 29, Campbell Soup intends to increase its total marketing spending to $440 million to $450 million, compared with about $400 million in the 2013 fiscal year.

Although Campbell Soup has embarked on a diversification strategy, making acquisitions like Plum Organics and bringing out new products like V8 Complete Nutrition Bars, soup still is its biggest business line, accounting for about 36 percent of total sales. After struggling to turn around declines in demand for its mainstay condensed soups, the company has begun to see signs of progress; in the 2013 fiscal year, which ended on July 28, sales of the red-and-white soups rose 2 percent compared with the 2012 fiscal year.

“It’s a growing business,” Mr. Carolan said, and the new campaign has a “springboard to build on that momentum.”

The Wisest Kid campaign replaces ads, carrying the theme “It’s amazing what soup can do,” that were created by BBDO New York and Y&R New York, part of the Y&R unit of the Young & Rubicam Group, owned by WPP. Y&R New York is now focused on creating ads for new products like Campbell’s Go soups in pouches, which are aimed at millennial consumers in their 20s and 30s.

Other agencies working on the Wisest Kid campaign, in addition to BBDO New York, include Proximity Worldwide, the digital arm of BBDO Worldwide; MEC, part of the GroupM unit of WPP, for media services; and Weber Shandwick, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, for public relations.

The new brand mascot may be wise, but he is certainly not a wiseguy or wiseacre. Unlike the smart-aleck children who appear in packaged-food ads from mainstream marketers like the Kraft Foods Group, the low-key humor in the Wisest Kid ads reflects the more traditional corporate personality of Campbell Soup.

“We want to make sure the kid is not annoying,” Mr. Seamark said, adding that the campaign was intended to be lighthearted. Mr. Carolan concurred, saying: “Mealtime is fun. Food is fun.”

In another way, however, the campaign takes an up-to-date approach, by portraying fathers as well as mothers as family meal-makers. That “is designed to reflect the modern face of America,” Mr. Seamark said.

DealBook: Bribery Charges in China for Official Whose Child Worked for JPMorgan

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The Haggler: Tracking a Child Support Mix-Up In New York

There are surveys that cover just about every aspect of air travel: rates of on-time departures, rankings of frequent-flier programs, and on and on. But the Haggler has never seen a study that shows which airlines regard fliers as the biggest idiots.

Huge omission, right? And until a thorough inquiry is undertaken, the Haggler contends that US Airways takes the dimmest view of its customers’ intelligence. On what evidence is that conclusion based? When you call the airline’s reservation number, the first utterance you hear after you shimmy up the phone tree and await a representative is this:

“Note that under federal law, passengers are prohibited from bringing hazardous materials on the aircraft.”

Is there a sentient human on this planet who is unaware that bringing hazmat on a jet is verboten? Is it not self-evident that loading up your baggage with potentially lethal, flammable and/or toxic chemicals is uncool, not to mention illegal?

The most charitable explanation here is that US Airways is just trying to kill some time by filling your ears with factoids, as you stew on hold. But being called a dummy, by implication, doesn’t make the stewing more pleasant. Quite the opposite. Why not just remind us to wear clothing to the airport? Or to walk upright?

The Haggler posed these questions to US Airways, mostly because he can. A spokesman, John McDonald, wrote back and noted that a lot of passengers have no idea how many everyday items are considered hazmat by the Federal Aviation Administration. He listed some: spare curling-iron gas cartridges, dry ice in an airtight container, a can of aerosol spray starch, loaded firearms.

The loaded firearms — not really a surprise. But the others are.

“Our friendly little reminder on the start of the call,” Mr. McDonald wrote, “is just to pique interest, as it did with you, to ask the question: What is hazmat?”

Respectfully, as an interest piquer, the “little reminder” stinks. So here’s some free advice: Bag the little reminder and give callers a list of the surprising items that are banned. Or list eight items that might be hazmat and challenge callers to pick out the one that isn’t.

“Great idea,” wrote Mr. McDonald, effectively neutralizing the Haggler with cheap praise. “I’ll pass it along to our reservations team.”

Problem all but solved.

Question: Is there any way to improve the world that is too trivial for the Haggler?

Apparently not!

Enough of this folderol. It’s question time.

Q. I am a single mother, and my case does not involve bad corporate customer service but rather the seemingly impenetrable New York City Office of Child Support Enforcement that has for months now miscalculated the child support arrears owed by my daughter’s father.

An order was issued by family court on Nov. 30, 2012, specifying that the support collection unit of the O.C.S.E. was to assess the father’s arrears at $12,568 plus the previously calculated arrears, which were $7,439. Instead of adding the new arrears to the old, as instructed by the court order, the O.C.S.E. substituted the new arrears of $12,568 for the previously calculated arrears of $7,439. An amended order was issued on Jan. 8, 2013, in an attempt to be clearer for the O.C.S.E.’s employees.

The amended order came only after I spent five hours speaking with eight different people in two different buildings.

But the new order didn’t help. Yet again, the O.C.S.E. simply substituted the new arrears of $12,568 for the previously calculated arrears of $7,439.

I have spent the past four months doing everything within my power to rectify this situation, and I have failed. If I were to seek legal counsel to help me, I’d be spending thousands of dollars to try to get a state bureaucracy to do its job enforcing a court order. The $7,439 that I am trying to get would be spent in legal fees.

If you would consider trying to intervene on my behalf, I would be more grateful than you could know.

L.G.

New York

A. The Haggler has spent little time dealing with the public sector, so he sent an e-mail to Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate. Mr. de Blasio, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor, runs an office that mediates between the electorate and the city government. He handed off this matter to a staff member, Phil Walzak, who brought in the office’s director of constituent services, America Canas.

The pair went at this for several weeks. On April 23, Mr. Walzak wrote to say, “Still gathering the details on this case, but my constituent services person says the case outcome is actually positive.”

The Haggler spoke to Mr. Walzak and Ms. Canas a few days later, and they were low on details about what exactly went wrong at the Human Resources Administration, home of the O.C.S.E.

“Why it got screwed up at the front end, we don’t know,” Mr. Walzak said.

“A little bit of a missed communication,” Ms. Canas speculated, “and a lot of emotion.”

The leaders at the Human Resources Administration did not offer much more illumination. A spokeswoman, Carmen Boon, initially suggested that this entire matter was fed to the Haggler by the public advocate’s office, presumably to make that office seem like heroes. (Untrue.) Then she e-mailed a statement.

“This is a very rare instance in which an unconventional court order lacking proper terminology and not identifying a specific dollar amount to add back to the arrears balance caused confusion among our staff,” Ms. Boon wrote. “Once the issues with the order were detected, H.R.A. worked as quickly as possible to update the amounts owed and fix this unfortunate situation.”

It would nice to file this entire affair under the category of “learning experience.” But nobody here seems to have learned anything. Other than the Haggler, who learned that he much prefers dealing with the private sector, where blame-pinning is invariably far easier.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Ga. Lawyer Mobilizes Advocates for Prevention of Child Sex Abuse

Lawrence Kasmen is a risk-taker in private life, but his professional passion is to reduce the risk of sexual abuse for children.
John Disney, Daily Report

Personally and professionally, Lawrence Kasmen views himself as a risk-taker, a trait he ascribes to genetics and upbringing. "My father is the same way," he said.

Kasmen has ridden motorcycles and jumped out of planes. He roamed about the Middle East during politically tense times when tourism was discouraged.

A corporate and commercial real estate attorney, he fled the security of a large company to start his own law firm. On the side, he developed real estate and built homes. More recently, he created, with a partner, a mobile app for businesses.

But his latest passion is intended to reduce risk for others. For the past few years, Kasmen has instructed adults on how to prevent sexual abuse of children.

Soon after an entrepreneurial spirit led to the launch of Mobilezen, an app designed to promote business, Kasmen landed the Georgia Center for Child Advocacy as a client. Attending the 2009 Cheer for Children Ball, its annual black-tie fundraiser in November, he was inspired to undergo a three-hour training program with the Stewards of Children, a national awareness group.

He became a trainer, offering advice and guidance to other adults, and relishes his role in a ripple effect of the educational process. His lessons focus on how to recognize, address and report incidents of grown-ups' misconduct with kids.

"The theory is, children should not be their own keeper," said Kasmen, who provides some free services with the mobile app to the center. "It is incumbent on adults to protect children from sexual abuse."

Kasmen's devotion to the cause has landed him a seat on the board of directors for the Georgia Center for Child Advocacy beginning next year.

He recently spoke to the Daily Report about his commitment.

What spurred you to get involved?

I am a father of two boys, now 5 1/2 and 4. That is probably it.

When my wife and I went to the Georgia Center for Child Advocacy event, we were moved by the cause. No one was really asking for money. It was a charity that was asking for your time and commitment and effort.

As lawyers, we have a duty to leverage our status, our position. I thought the best way I could get involved is to go and do Stewards of Children training. I can expose people to the problem and hopefully incite them to act or go through the training themselves. I try to get organizations to train their leaders and employees.

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Advertising: Save the Children Uses OneRepublic in Child Mortality Campaign

Meant to gain financial and political support for the organization’s efforts to reduce child mortality, the campaign — called “Every Beat Matters” — was created by the New York office of the BBDO ad agency, part of the Omnicom Group, for Save the Children and the Advertising Council. OneRepublic’s song, called “Feel Again,” was released in August on iTunes and will be featured on the group’s album, “Native,” to be released in March.

The campaign is BBDO’s second for Save the Children, based in Westport, Conn., and the Ad Council; its first was introduced in 2010. Both campaigns were created to support the newborn and child survival efforts, primarily overseas, of Save the Children. According to Unicef data, about seven million children a year die before their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable and treatable causes like pneumonia, diarrhea and neonatal complications. Newborns account for 40 percent of those deaths.

David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America, said that when the agency began working with Save the Children, it decided to use the organization’s “unheralded” health workers to illustrate its aid efforts. The first campaign depicted actual workers in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, walking to work in rural villages and examining children.

The new campaign came about, Mr. Lubars said, when BBDO discovered a new type of stethoscope that lets the user listen to and record a patient’s heartbeat. It hired the documentary makers Sean and Andrea Fine, who have worked in Uganda and India, to film a local health worker, trained by Save the Children, in a rural village in Malawi.

The Fines’s 90-second television spot opens with the health worker, Chisomo Boxer, preparing for work and waiting on his bicycle on a dirt road. It then shows an airplane flying over rural Africa, carrying a box that is unloaded from the plane and delivered to Mr. Boxer. He enters the village, surrounded by children, and opens the box, which contains a special stethoscope. He uses it to listen to and record the children’s heartbeats and to assess their health.

The second half of the spot shows the Denver recording studio of OneRepublic. The group’s lead singer, Ryan Tedder, plugs a cable into the stethoscope, listens to the heartbeats of the children from Malawi and composes a song incorporating them. OneRepublic is then shown recording the song.

The ad concludes with Mr. Boxer riding his bicycle in Malawi with the stethoscope strapped to it, the village children running behind him. “Feel Again” is played, and a voice-over says: “This song was created with heartbeats of children in need. Find out how it can help front-line health workers bring hope to millions of children at EveryBeatMatters.org,” a Web site that BBDO created for the campaign.

BBDO also designed three print ads, each a “heartbeat portrait” of a different aid worker, one of whom is Mr. Boxer. Each portrait is made up of dozens of real electrocardiogram images; the name of each child whose electrocardiogram is shown is printed in tiny type to the left of the image.

The copy on Mr. Boxer’s ad says: “Actual heartbeats from the children Chisomo saved in Malawi created this portrait of him. Help front-line health workers like Chisomo bring hope to millions of children at EveryBeatMatters.org.”

The campaign also includes Web banners that employ Mr. Boxer’s “heartbeat portrait,” radio spots featuring Mr. Tedder, outdoor ads and Facebook and Twitter initiatives encouraging people to download OneRepublic’s song.

In addition, BBDO created an interactive kiosk that lets users plug their headphones into stethoscopes to listen to a child’s heartbeat, “Feel Again” and a message from Mr. Tedder. The kiosk was on display last month at the One Club in New York, and the Ad Council is arranging new sites for it this year.

Mr. Tedder said all the proceeds — both to the band and to its record label, Interscope — from the first 750,000 downloads of the song on iTunes would go to Save the Children. According to Peggy Conlon, president and chief executive of the Ad Council, the song has been downloaded more than 600,000 times so far.

Mr. Tedder, who has a young son, went to Guatemala after he wrote “Feel Again” to see firsthand how children lived there. “In many cases, the only thing that keeps these kids alive is these front-line health workers trained by Save the Children,” he said.

The campaign’s Web site was introduced in August, and the Ad Council began distributing its ads in September. “The goal of the campaign is to create awareness and raise money,” Mr. Lubars, the BBDO North America chairman, said. “We wanted to make it very personal, not negative, uplifting.”

Ms. Conlon said the intended audience for the campaign was “people who care about international childhood mortality, who are likely to be more involved with charitable work.” She added that it was the first time the Ad Council had relied heavily on the contributions of a pop music group in the creation of a campaign.

Mary Beth Powers, chief of Save the Children’s newborn and child survival campaign, said Mr. Tedder’s involvement “certainly brings new, younger audiences to the issue of child survival.”

She also said Save the Children hoped the new campaign would inspire Americans to tell elected officials that “they can’t balance the budget” — which has in the past contained financing for foreign aid programs — “on the backs of women and children globally.”

Child Murder Case Pushes Miami Prosecutor to Become Judge

 Monica Gordo
Photo by Candace West

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Monica Gordo knew she wanted to be a lawyer since she was a little girl. She discovered she wanted to be a judge after prosecuting the case of another little girl, killed by an AK-47 round as she played in the front yard of her Miami neighborhood Liberty City home.

Sherdavia Jenkins died in her mother's arms. She was 9 years old.

"It really affected me," Gordo said. "I thought, this shouldn't happen in America -- that children die at the front door of their house."

The case took three years. Gordo was pregnant with her second son by the time it finished. When she came back from maternity leave and stepped into a new position as a division chief in the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office, she discovered she had a new ambition: to become a judge.

"Something happened in that process," she said. "That was when I realized that my passion was different. It changed."

Becoming a prosecutor, and eventually a judge, almost didn't happen.

"It's funny, because in law school I never even took criminal law," she said. "I went to law school thinking I would be some kind of corporate transactional type. I might not even practice law."

Gordo was born in Miami in 1975, the daughter of a doctor and one of the first woman vice presidents at Miami-based Eastern Airlines. Watching them work two and three jobs each and enduring three years of separation so her father could go to medical school in the Dominican Republic inspired her.

"He had an absolute passion for what he wanted to do in life," Gordo said. She followed his example, just not into medicine. "What I did want to do is find something I had a passion for."

Gordo graduated high school at age 16, and got her bachelor's in business at the University of Miami when she was 21. She went straight into UM's school of law. In her third year, she took a litigation skills course just to make sure her education was well-rounded. The professor pushed her into an internship at the state attorney's office.

Child Murder Case Pushes Miami Prosecutor to Become Judge

 Monica Gordo
Photo by Candace West

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Monica Gordo knew she wanted to be a lawyer since she was a little girl. She discovered she wanted to be a judge after prosecuting the case of another little girl, killed by an AK-47 round as she played in the front yard of her Miami neighborhood Liberty City home.

Sherdavia Jenkins died in her mother's arms. She was 9 years old.

"It really affected me," Gordo said. "I thought, this shouldn't happen in America -- that children die at the front door of their house."

The case took three years. Gordo was pregnant with her second son by the time it finished. When she came back from maternity leave and stepped into a new position as a division chief in the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office, she discovered she had a new ambition: to become a judge.

"Something happened in that process," she said. "That was when I realized that my passion was different. It changed."

Becoming a prosecutor, and eventually a judge, almost didn't happen.

"It's funny, because in law school I never even took criminal law," she said. "I went to law school thinking I would be some kind of corporate transactional type. I might not even practice law."

Gordo was born in Miami in 1975, the daughter of a doctor and one of the first woman vice presidents at Miami-based Eastern Airlines. Watching them work two and three jobs each and enduring three years of separation so her father could go to medical school in the Dominican Republic inspired her.

"He had an absolute passion for what he wanted to do in life," Gordo said. She followed his example, just not into medicine. "What I did want to do is find something I had a passion for."

Gordo graduated high school at age 16, and got her bachelor's in business at the University of Miami when she was 21. She went straight into UM's school of law. In her third year, she took a litigation skills course just to make sure her education was well-rounded. The professor pushed her into an internship at the state attorney's office.

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