We had just started on the Service King account when a little copywriting assignment popped up. The client had bought radio ad space for Super Bowl 50. And they needed an ad.
It turns out the radio audience for the Super Bowl is tens of millions of people.
In this low-pressure situation, our approach was to throw everything at the wall.
There were serious scripts. Scripts that were as meta as meta can be. I wrote jokes that belong in a secure biocontainment facility. But ultimately, we found the right use for the time we’d been given.
The spot, ‘Mission2Hire’, told the story of Service King employee and decorated veteran Jeremiah Kuehl, who served his country in Afghanistan and Iraq. After he was wounded, he found work through Service King’s Mission2Hire program, transferring his hard-earned skills to civilian life.
There was no reason to overwrite or overdo this ad. The story spoke for itself.
By popular vote, the ad won the 2016 Westwood One Awards of Sound, beating out more highly-favored contenders, and tested nicely in a Nielsen study of 3,030 consumers.