How Starbucks fought for its life with a 60-second ad

Photo credit: siraphol / 123RF

The following is an edited excerpt from Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul. Written by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, the book describes the viral ad campaign that turned the coffee company’s fortunes after it suffered losses in 2008. The excerpt was provided by Rodale Books, and you can buy a copy here.

“Watch this, ” said David Lubars, the chief creative officer of our advertising agency, BBDO.

Then on the screen, against a subdued burlap background, dark green words in clean capital letters popped up one at a time to form a question, then another. There was no talking in the video. Just piano music and two questions: “What if we all cared enough to vote? Not just 54% of us, but 100% of us?”

It was less than one week before the 2008 presidential election in the United States, and the race had been historic. Former first lady and senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had narrowly lost the Democratic primary to the first African-American presidential candidate, a senator from the state of Illinois, Barack Obama.

“What if we cared as much on Nov. 5th as we care on nov. 4th? What if we cared all of the time the way we care some of the time? What if we cared when it was inconvenient as much as we care when it’s convenient? Would your community be a better place? Would our country be a better place? Would our world be a better place? We think so, too. If you care enough to vote, we care enough to give you a free cup of coffee. Come into Starbucks on Nov. 4th tell us you voted, and we’ll proudly give you a tall cup of brewed coffee on us.”

With David hovering over his shoulder, Terry watched the last words crop up on the screen: You & Starbucks. It’s bigger than coffee. The 60-second ad was, Terry knew immediately, brilliant. Simple. Quiet. Smart. Emotional.

The spot was unlike anything he’d seen on television, at least recently given that the airwaves seemed dominated by political pundits screaming over each other. Yet it was relevant to this particular moment in time. The ad worked because it was not about Starbucks, but rather about what Starbucks is about, especially just coming out of New Orleans: community and personal responsibility. “We have to do this,” said Terry.

I shared the ad with Norman Lear, the revered television writer and producer who is also a good friend and had joined me in New Orleans. Norman, whose taste I trust implicitly, also thought it was dead-on. If we could pull this off, the commercial would be only the second time Starbucks advertised on television. If. If our marketing and public relations teams could rally instead of resting once we all returned to Seattle after a successful but exhausting week.

If we could secure the right commercial time slots and maximize its exposure. If we could afford it. If we could get the word out to customers and coordinate our store partners. And if we had enough coffee to handle traffic overflow. We had four days to figure it all out. I have never embraced traditional advertising for Starbucks. Unlike most consumer brands that are built with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on marketing, our success had been won with millions of daily interactions.

Starbucks is the quintessential experiential brand – what happens between our customers and partners inside our stores – and that had defined us for three decades. But it was no longer enough. I’ve known David Lubars for a very long time, and he understood, perhaps better than other marketing professionals, my avoidance of traditional advertising. We’d last worked together in Starbucks’ earlier days, and David had taken the top job at BBDO in 2004 and was being hailed as one of the most out-of-the-box thinkers on Madison Avenue.

He’d been the conceptual mind behind the groundbreaking mini-films for BMW as well as innovative campaigns for Apple, HBO, and FedEx. In September 2008, Starbucks had parted ways, somewhat painfully, with our primary advertising agency of four years, Portland, Oregon-based Wieden+Kennedy. I have great respect for Dan Wieden, who coined the Nike tagline “Just Do It” as well as developing other iconic campaigns. Dan is undoubtedly one of advertising’s greatest professionals, and I was sorry to see the relationship end.

For the first time in Starbucks’ history, outside forces were defining us. That very fall a McDonald’s billboard campaign had declared, “Four bucks is dumb” on a sign not far from our Seattle support center. Yet we were silent. It infuriated me. “We have got to get on the offensive,” I said. “Not on the attack. But pro-actively define ourselves, find our voice, and express the personality of the company.”

While I was ready to talk seriously about how Starbucks should use advertising, I was not interested in a traditional client-agency relationship. Instead of looking to an agency for answers, Starbucks needed a partner open to creative debate and tension, with whom we could have an ongoing dialogue, free of time-consuming formalities, to help us problem solve.