Notes on... DIG's Winter marketing campaign

DIG is a cooking company on a mission to empower the next generation of farmers, cooks, and chefs.

What you get in a DIG restaurant isn’t a pre-pack situation - dishes are cooked to order. It’s fast-casual in front, full-service in the back. And the menu changes every season.

Cooking is at the core.

This stirs up a couple of things:

• First, not everyone knows this.
• Second, the chefs continuously learn new recipes, techniques, and skills. This is powerful, but not easy - especially when you’re busy in the kitchen

Each new menu needs to go Inside Out. There’s a rollout to the field (inside the org), and a rollout to customers and fans (outside).

It’s a complex process with many steps and checkpoints involved - crossing culinary, operations, marketing and training.

The DIG leadership team were curious how they could:

1. Bring these two work streams closer together, and build a smart integrated production system
2. Create killer content, led by their employees, that landed at the intersection of training and marketing (a smart way to do more with less, and lean into output that’s both educational and entertaining)

So they asked us to help them figure it out.

First, a taster of the campaign content:

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We’ll share the full breakdown in another post - for now here are our notes on show running DIG’s Winter Campaign.

Howard

• Personalities: The internal talent are really good. We found most success when offering a few small coaching tips, and let them run with it. Even for novices in front of the camera, the muscle for doing this kind of work can build very quickly
• Mini moments: We wanted to add a bunch of quick riffs on ingredients. Some of these were too heavily designed up front. It's important to have them fairly fleshed out, but again let the chefs run with them
• Run & Gun: The whole shoot happened over two days in a live (and busy!) restaurant. It can be done, but it ain't easy

Sarah

• The venn crossover is deceptive. Although training content can be valuable for both internal & external audiences, the methods & specifics (scale, safety, speed, detail etc) often prove to be better honed in for each specific audience. Doing multiple versions needs extra pre-production + production time and can’t always be “fixed in post”.
• There is a low stakes opportunity (pending appetite & capacity) for DIG’s internal staff to act as content creators for their internal training needs, all while building their own skills as producers and presenters
• When it comes to training—details matter. The marketing content is successful - it elevates internal staff to stars and it engaged the audience with the DIG personalities, but missed a few important instructional elements (i.e. the need to use cut gloves when chopping).
• Goldilocks: When it comes to trying to make one piece of content for different audiences it’s hard to be “just right” for all
• With a multiple stakeholder production, i.e. culinary, marketing, people and production teams, building a solid process is the key to success

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What we’re doing next

• Process design for production using external partners (marketing focus)
• Process design for production internally (training focus)
• Templates and guides for ‘sweet spot’ opportunities that hit the intersection
• Internal production training program - launching into DIG’s digital learning space with async and live learning

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