• by Nina Lentini  @Nina_Lentini, March 7, 2007

What do you do when the brand you've acquired hasn't been advertised since Jack Klugman played crime-fighting coroner Quincy?

That's where Sergei Szortyka, president of Reading, Pa.-based Quaker Maid Meats, Inc., found himself last year after his company bought the Steak-umms Company from H.J. Heinz Co.'s Ore-Ida Foods unit.

Now, and through mid-May, Steak-umms national TV ads are airing for the first time in 20-something years. The 10-second spots will run on 18 nationally syndicated programs ranging from "Wheel of Fortune" and "Judge Judy" to "Dr. Phil," "Entertainment Tonight," "Whacked out Sports" and "CNN Headline News." The target consumers are women, 18 to 54, primary purchasers of sandwich steaks. The company estimates it will make half a billion household impressions in 12 weeks.

The spots are built around a new melody to an old Steak-umm jingle: "You can Steak-umm in the North / You can Steak-umm in the South / But the best part of all / Is when you Steak-umm in your mouth." The ads look retro in their simplicity. They depict a black man in an urban setting on one side of the screen and a white woman in the suburbs or country on the other side of the screen, both biting into sub-sized Steak-umm sandwiches. They were produced by WonderWorks of Chesapeake, Va.

"The brand has a tremendous amount of recognition yet," says Szortyka. "We know, we've competed against it for 20-some years. Many people have told us, 'I remember when I used to eat it' or 'I remember fondly eating Steak-umm sandwich steaks,' and for whatever reason they stopped. We created a new jingle but the lyrics are identical to the ones Heinz created for the brand.

"We thought, why not bring back what people remember - reinforce the brand rather than reinvent it."

Szortyka says the plan is to "hit it hard. We haven't spent marketing dollars in this fashion in years, and we knew we needed to do something to resurrect the brand." Indeed, Quaker Maid Meats spent just $1,325 on advertising in all of 2005, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus. After May, he says, the company will determine its return on investment before making new marketing decisions.

Steak-umms began in South Philadelphia and helped turned the classic Philly cheese steak into standard fare nationally. The Gagliardi Brothers marketed the product from the 1950s until 1980, when they sold the company to Heinz for $17 million.

In 1983, a TV spot produced by Doyle Dane Bernbach began airing on national TV promoting Steak-Umm All Beef Sandwich Steaks with Jack Klugman, then in his last year as the hero of "Quincy," as its spokesman.