Yeehaw! Philadelphia’s Phillyboy Reinvents Their Brand

Make creative your competitive edge; unlock insights and inspiration from 100,000+ ads, rooted in emotional response, to predict and improve your creative’s business impact. Access every Ad Of The Week in our Topical Ads categories.

Philadelphia’s new campaign is a case of ‘come for the brand character, stay for the fresh product take’. Behind agency Johannes Leonardo’s creation of the eye-catching new “Phillyboy” mascot is a carefully thought-through campaign designed to expand the possibility space of America’s best loved soft cheese.

Before we look at how it all connects, though, let’s take a closer look at the Phillyboy himself. He’s a character with a clear concept, a big surprise factor and obvious visual appeal – a stetson-toting cowboy who takes the “cow” part literally, riding into town on a Holstein cow. There’s a specially written country song to back the idea up, too. It’s an immediately attention-grabbing idea from Philadelphia and the potential to stretch the character across media and platforms and into later ads is obvious.

In fact, the Phillyboy has the potential to be an exceptional Fluent Device – our term for a recurring creative element in ads that drives the story consistently across multiple campaigns. In our book The Creative Dividend, in partnership with Effie Worldwide, we looked at how consistency in general and Fluent Devices in particular are profit multipliers for campaigns. A brand character like the Phillyboy touches multiple bases – he’s entertaining, a durable brand asset and a business booster.

We see that in action with the Test Your Ad Pro results. The Phillyboy’s origin story ad gets a very good 3.7-Star Rating (our measure predicting long-term business effects). That’s well above the 2.8-Star average for spreads and condiments, and in the top associations for the ad we see words lile “unique” and “playful” coming up. What’s more impressive though is the exceptional short-term Spike Rating, which predicts short-term sales gains. This ad is doing more than establishing a brand asset for the long-term; it’s driving growth right away.

To understand why that is we need to look at what’s going on in the ad beyond its cow-riding star. The Phillyboy’s mission isn’t just to sell soft cheese, it’s to expand the idea of what Philadelphia can do as an ingredient. So we see the product spread on bagels but also stirred into chili and pasta dishes.

This is where the strategic part of Philadelphia and Johannes Leonardo’s work comes in – using the entertaining part of the ad to win attention and open people’s minds to rethink the whole idea of what Philadelphia soft cheese is. Just like a guy riding a cow gets them to rethink the idea of cowboys. In that big short-term boost and good long-term prospect, we can see how successful that promises to be.