• by Karl Greenberg , January 5, 2010

 

FedEx is launching a raft of humorous TV spots during the Bowl Championship Series. The ads use vignettes featuring an assortment of zany executives, consultants, bosses and managers to promote things like domestic overnight delivery, international shipping, FedEx Ground, FedEx Office Print Online and FedEx Office.

The five spots -- the first of which debuts Tuesday night on the FedEx Orange Bowl -- are a part of FedEx's brand campaign, "We Understand," which launched last year. One of the ads in the campaign, which touts the company for its various business services, has a small-business owner strolling into a FedEx Office store (formerly FedEx Kinko's) and thanking each of the counter staffers personally for a job well done, getting their names wrong in the process and yelling at a closed door, "Good work, guys!" Another staffer corrects him: "Um ... that's a closet."

Steve Pacheco, managing director of advertising at FedEx, tells Marketing Daily that the spot was shot in a FedEx Office store in Phoenix and features actor Willard Pew -- Harpo in the Oprah Winfrey film "The Color Purple" -- as the frenetic small-business owner. "We hoped that spot typifies how reliable and unflappable our team is," he says.

Another spot touting FedEx ground shipping has an office putting a shipping order together when one of the guys sitting at a table wakes up from a 20-year sleep, unaware that FedEx now does ground shipping or that The Culture Club has disbanded. He runs off weeping because "I never got to see them live."

The Memphis, Tenn.-based company will also be launching a marketing Web site that will host the ads. Fedex.com/weunderstand explores FedEx products and services. The company is also doing an online ad campaign on major news sites like Washingtonpost.com, Slate.com, and Inc.com, etc.

The TV campaign, via BBDO New York, will run on a combination of sports and cable news programming including the NFL playoffs, FedExCup and NASCAR.

Pacheco says the new spots, which were finalized last month and debuted during the broadcast of the Sugar Bowl, will continue through the Bowl schedule this week and "ramp into our regular broadcast schedule, which is heavy on cable and sports news. Our philosophy has always been that we use mass reach media as sort of air cover for all other messaging we do." Pacheco adds that each commercial focuses on a specific FedEx product and has a call to action to the "We Understand" Web site.

Also, per Pacheco, FedEx's Bowl sponsorship includes in-game branding during broadcasts. FedEx also sponsors NFL, and has a sponsorship agreement with the NBA that puts FedEx on NBA.com. The company also has ownership of the FedEx Cup as part of its involvement with the PGA Tour.