Dan Dahlen knows more than just a little about creating effective advertising. When he was the worldwide Subway account director at Publicis & Hal Riney in Chicago, he saw Jared Fogle in a “wacky diets” story in a men’s health magazine, tracked him down and put him in a TV campaign that continues today.
And who can forget Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” campaign in 1984? Dahlen was Wendy’s vice president of national advertising at the time.
Dahlen, who spent 23 years as an ad agency executive and eight as a marketing executive for Wendy’s, Shoney’s and Rally’s Hamburgers, recently joined IAG Research, a New York-based TV ad-effectiveness ratings company, as head of its new Restaurant Business Group.
Why did you join IAG?
It was a new and exciting challenge. It’s the first time in 31 years that I’m working for a syndicated research company. I’m able to leverage 31 years of restaurant marketing and advertising experience every second of the day. Each day will be a challenge. Each day will be new.
FAST FACTS AGE: 52 HOMETOWN: Columbus, Ohio EDUCATION: bachelor’s degree in journalism with an advertising major, Ohio University HOBBIES: traveling, golf, sports in general YEARS IN MARKETING: 31
What did you learn by working as a restaurant marketing executive?
When you go on the air with advertising there’s one thing that’s expected, and that’s increased traffic and sales immediately. Often if you launched a campaign on Monday night, by Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday you’ve got yourself and the CEO and the franchisees wondering if it’s working. There is a correlation between brilliant television and positive same-store sales. I also learned that everything starts and ends with the product.
Traditional TV advertising is still healthy?
Even though nontraditional spending is increasing at such a huge percentage each year, it’s still a small base. There’s significant growth in non-TV areas on a percentage basis but the dollars are relatively small. The money still goes in traditional advertising. The networks sense this and will not stand there and watch all this revenue go away. They’ll make their programming more relevant and interesting to the viewers.
Should restaurant chains move even further into nontraditional media?
They need to understand what the opportunities are. As you look into these opportunities from a cost standpoint, they’re not necessarily cheap when compared to other options like TV or radio or outdoor. Another thing is it’s hard to measure the impact of these investments. When you stand in front of a franchisee group and say, “Look what a cool mobile phone coupon promotion we did,” the first thing they’ll say is, “How much did it cost?” And secondly, “Did it work?” Unless you have an evaluation instrument in place for that specific tactic, it’s hard to tell what’s driving sales. Is it the mobile phone portion [driving sales growth] or is it the overall TV or the promotion we launched three weeks prior to that?
How difficult is it to differentiate from the competition?
To me it’s one of the most challenging and difficult things to do, to find the soul of the product and articulate what’s different and what’s better about the brand than the competition. There is no easy answer. Sometimes it’s not what you say but how you say it. You have to have a superior product. If you have a me-too product or a mediocre product or a product that’s irrelevant or uninteresting, you won’t achieve that differentiation. If you have a product that people want to consume, [differentiating] requires smart people on the corporate side and agency side to come up with the one thing to communicate in advertising.