When the Clock Strikes Dinner, Stouffer’s Prepared Meals Is Ready

Every single day, we deal with Dinner Dread. It can strike morning, noon and typically at 4pm, but it’s a question we can’t escape, whether we are trying to figure out what we are in the mood to eat for a dinner solo, with a partner, or what to serve for an entire family meal. Again. Stouffer’s new campaign highlights this universal tension – and positions their meals as the delicious solution. And it’s one of their biggest integrated campaigns in years. 

Just like Dinner Dread, the campaign, created by VML New York, will be impossible to avoid. Driving down the street, flipping through a magazine, listening to music, and checking sports scores online, consumers will do a double take, as the Stouffer’s fake print and OOH ads appear as 'real' ads for things like perfume, razors, and jewellery, but with everyone’s question of the day, “What's for dinner?”  

VML partnered with fellow WPP agency OpenMind for media takeovers in Atlanta, Cleveland, Dallas, DC, Indianapolis, Tampa and LA including digital out-of-home which go live during prime Dinner Dread hours, 4-6 pm in each respective market. This week’s issues of People and US Weekly feature four consecutive ads in a row for Stouffer’s disguised as typical ads for their category followed by the solution- Stouffer’s. 

“We turned an age-old question “What’s for Dinner?” to a cultural moment of Dinner Dread to create one of our biggest integrated campaigns in years,” said Megan McLaughlin, senior brand manager at Nestlé. "As consumers encounter our campaign flipping through a magazine, commuting to work or listening to music on Spotify, we hope they will be inspired to add Stouffer’s to their cart and stock their freezers and know there’s always a solution for dinner" 

Anchored by the brand’s new tagline, 'When the Clock Strikes Dinner,' the campaign will also feature TV spots bringing the phenomenon of dinner dread to life in absurd, but highly relatable ways. Each spot follows a protagonist who can't escape the dreaded question “what’s for dinner?” It’s quite literally everywhere they look. But thankfully, they have a delicious Stouffer’s meal to snap them out of their dinner dread and back into reality.  

“We found this killer insight around dinner dread that haunts Americans nightly and created a campaign that answers the inescapable question ‘what’s for dinner?’ in an unexpected way,” said Rosie Bardales, chief creative officer, VML New York.

The campaign is currently in market. Their 30 second spot for the campaign will debut during Olympics programming next week.