Ruby Tuesday has been hyping this live webcast event for weeks. At 3pm yesterday the restaurant chain planned to demolish its very last old style location as a symbolic demonstration of their will to change every last detail that was keeping customer away— decor, attitude, image, etc.
A teaser of what could be expected had the company marketing exec smashing a chandelier with a sledgehammer and proclaiming, “it’ll be like that, times a zillion.”
So I got the email reminder at work and clicked the link to their site. When the weeks-ongoing countdown clock reached the zero hour, the site converted to the “live” stream and a small crowd formed at my desk.
The marketing guy appeared with a crowd of locals and the restaurant in view, said a few words about blowing it up, and started the countdown. At the moment of demolition, the rumble begins but the restaurant stays intact. The confused crowd looks to the left and the camera quickly pans, just in time to show the steakhouse next door get decimated. The engineers in hard hats go running in that direction and the spokesperson can be heard asking “what happened?” The stream then goes black.
I’m impressed by the execution of this gimmick. The use of destruction and misdirection — and even more literally, an unexpected implosion of a building — is edgy in marketing, given this decade’s events. But it’s powerful and unforgettable. (Ruby Tuesday even ran full page ads in newspapers with their manifesto as concrete poetry in the shape of a bomb).
We’ll see how this plays out in an ecomony that is dining less and less. It’s more courageous than the Bennigan’s move to close all of its stores in the middle of the night.
Vanguard Group today sold 99.3% of its holdings in Ruby Tuesday, so maybe I’m just playing into the stereotype of high concept marketing… the whole “advertising to advertisers” cliche. But personifying the brand as an apologetic, self-deprecating underdog trying to make good but cartoonishly failing + invoking subtle memories of WTC and its rebuild-and-redeem post-psychology + anchoring it all to the brand experience rather than product = A+ pomo art
