Hopefully, The Good Eats Agency Will Cook Up Fresh Ideas For Its Clients

I’ve always believed that more agencies need to be specialized in terms of the clients they’re willing to serve or the type of work they do.

Enter Good Eats, the Food and Beverage Innovations Agency.

A little background on the founder, from QSRweb.com:

Founded by creative director David Hale, the agency specializes in traditional ad campaigns and brand strategy to sales promotion, social media, direct response and shopper marketing, exclusively for food and beverage brands.

Hale’s past food, beverage and restaurant clients include Burger King, Outback Steakhouse, Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Miller Beer, McDonald’s and Papa John’s, among others. His “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules” campaign for Burger King was hailed as a category breakthrough in Advertising Age, and helped Burger King break a five-year sales decline, posting increases of 11 percent in its first year.

Fast food and chain (excuse me, QSR and Casual Dining) restaurant work is tough. Franchisees always want more immediate approaches to drive traffic, and get very pissy quickly. Price, item, and promotion-based work seems to prevail, along with too-good-to-be-true product close-up shots. And no amount of advertising helps when the food is truly mediocre or the brand loses its appeal. So here’s hoping that Good Eats can bring some insight into the category.

For my money, no campaign in this category has matched Jack In the Box for consistently funny, inventive, yet directly retail marketing.