An updated cup of joe

Like some twisted version of one of those Animal Planet TV shows (insert overdone Aussie accent here, "Oh, there he is! You can tell it's him by the spring in his step and the almost drug-induced smile on his smarmy face! Isn't that just awful?") everyone can spot the office "morning person" from 50 paces.

Now, imagine a horde of them. Dressed in sunburst yellow. Following you as you pad around your house trying to pull it together for yet another day in the grind. Singing a song so obsessively cheery (with words like "get out of bed, you sleepy head, you can sleep when you are dead!") that it might cause even the most passionate gun control advocate to reconsider.

That's the premise behind the "Tolerate Mornings" film and Web site sponsored by none other than Folgers. The company that called its product "the best part of waking up"...the people we can count on to replay the holiday spot in which "Peter" returns home from college and nudges the family downstairs by brewing up a pot...the folks who introduced us to Mrs. Olson, have come to the realization that coffee is the office drone's drug of choice.

Think about it. When people plan their route to work to ensure access to a Starbucks, coffee has stopped being an accompaniment to making it through the morning; it's now the recipe.

That leaves Folgers with a choice: Continue to do battle with the other home brews on taste, richness and other supposed differentiators that seem almost nostalgic, or plant its branding tongue firmly in cheek and say to its target audience, "Hey...we're there with ya, buddy." Clearly, when you put up a Web site that includes (among other things) automatic e-mail replies that will make you seem noble while you're actually catching a couple extra winks, they've chosen the later.

For once, the strategic marketing and communications folks have won, by convincing the higher ups that the greatest ground to be gained will happen if they convince their target audience of their product's, er, medicinal value, instead of duking it out with Maxwell House, et al.

So what does a really goofy spot aimed at coffee junkies mean for your marketing communications efforts? Plenty.

• You can be clever and strategic. Everyone in the communications business knows advertising campaigns that won awards but lost the agency the account in the process. Why? The creatives took over. Well, here's proof that you can start with a strategic premise and still have a powerfully persuasive delivery.
• An end run is often the best approach. Folgers delivers one memorable benefit - survival - that makes its pitch less about the differences between its mostly commoditized product and anyone else's, and more about a main, if unspoken, benefit sought by many of today's coffee drinkers. Brilliant.
• Hope sells. Watch the spot and see if you don't flash back (metaphorically speaking, of course) to the "I'd like to teach the world to sing" spots for Coca-Cola. The feeling is a bit more fatalistic here, but there a hint of hope underneath the dread of a new morning.

Will it sell more coffee? Only time will tell. Let's just hope that Folgers has the patience, the budget, and the wisdom to hang in there until the goofiness of it all becomes the subject of office breakroom chatter. Around a fresh, steaming pot of Folgers, of course.