Panera Bread’s Winter billboard campaign will warm you up. They are running billboards in places that actually get cold in the winter, like Chicago. The billboards feature one of their popular winter items, hot soup. One campaign features a smoke machine mounted behind the billboard, making it look like the delicious soup on the billboard is hot and steaming, ready to warm you up from the cold.
In our featured photo, you can see another campaign makes use of a stacked billboard configuration, showing the soup on the bottom billboard, with Panera’s Bacon Tomato Sandwich extending out from the top panel, about to dip into the Tomato Soup below. Both campaigns are great creative use of Out of Home Advertising. Although it hasn’t really gotten cold enough for long enough here in the South to want to make us hunker down with hot soup, the graphics on the billboards could tempt us even on the hottest Atlanta days.
Within the last few years, Panera has been highlighting their efforts to eliminate additives to their menu items, as well as eliminating hormones from their meats.They say they are working with farmers who believe in the same efforts, and have now made the switch to serving all clean food items. Panera’s website says that as of January 2017, they achieved their goal: “100% clean food made without artificial preservatives, sweeteners, flavors, or colors from artificial sources.”
The website also claims that the pork, poultry, and beef used at their restaurants is raised without antibiotics, and the beef is grass fed. As for the eggs, they say they have 14% cage free in their restaurants now, but Panera is pledging to source 100% cage free by 2020 across the United States. They say it will be the same in Canada by 2025.
The next report on the progress of their promises is due out midway through this year.
*We can’t take credit for creating the word “Souptacular.” That honor goes to Bill Board, publisher of the awesome OOH Today website.