Tater Kegs: Consumer Brand Case Study

THE SETUP

A product that had to be seen to be understood

Stone Gate Foods built a jumbo potato stuffed with the flavors a bar menu actually sells. Tater Kegs are several times the size of a tot, which is the whole point and the whole problem.

Sales was working. Reps were on the road getting the product in front of foodservice buyers, and it was landing.

Digital was doing nothing. The brand had no presence to support what the road team was building, and no way to reach buyers the reps had not gotten to yet.

The core challenge was scale in the literal sense. A foodservice buyer scrolling past a photo of a potato does not register that it is four times the size of what they currently serve. The size has to be obvious in under a second.

Our campaign brought in roughly 200 qualified leads.

THE SOLUTION

The Big Tater Era

First job was the brand. Tater Kegs needed a look that carried the size and the flavor lineup without a paragraph of explanation, so we built the Big Tater Era platform around exactly that.

Then the destination. We built a landing page for the campaign and later ported it into the main Tater Kegs site, so the new brand ran everywhere instead of just in the ads.

Program highlights include:

A brand refresh introducing Tater Kegs and the flavor lineup
The Big Tater Era campaign platform
A campaign landing page, later ported into the main site
Motion graphics built to convey the actual size of the product
Paid social targeting restaurant and foodservice professionals
A sample request flow handing qualified leads to the Tater Kegs sales team

THE STRATEGY

Sell the size, then get out of the way

Static images undersell this product. Motion does not. We built social creative that showed the scale in the first frame, aimed at restaurant professionals who evaluate menu additions for a living.

The ask was a menu upgrade, and the action was a sample request. Foodservice buyers do not order off an ad. They want the product in their kitchen, so the campaign existed to get a box in front of them.

From the sample request forward, the Tater Kegs team took over. Our job was volume and quality at the top, and theirs was closing, which is the right division of labor for a product that sells itself once someone tastes it.

One unplanned result worth noting. Consumers found the campaign and started asking how to buy Tater Kegs for their own kitchens, which is a demand signal the brand did not have before and cannot serve yet.

THE RESULTS

Foodservice buyers responded above benchmark

Targeted social outperformed both our forecasts and the industry average for the category.

500+

Form fills on the landing page

200

Qualified leads

Why it matters:

Roughly 40% of form fills came through as qualified leads, which is a strong ratio for cold foodservice prospecting
Performance beat both our forecast and the industry average, so the creative approach was doing the work
Consumer inquiries arrived unprompted, which points to a retail opportunity the brand has not opened yet