For over 70 years, Johnsonville has done things its own way: the Johnsonville way. It’s a way that puts employees first and empowers them to have a stake in this family-owned sausage business.

This year, we took that company mentality to the next level by asking Johnsonville employees to come up with all the company’s advertising.

We started with the commercials, and after hundreds of interviews, we ended with a car chase, a haunted house and a man talking to his animal friends in the forest. From there, the Johnsonville employees manned a sausage hotline, wrote and recorded radio commercials and even starred in the world's most intense reality show: The Johnsonville Sausage Dome.

As it turns out, the best people for coming up with sausage ideas are the people who actually make the sausage.

TV drove awareness in a wide audience over multiple flights in support of high-volume sales periods during the year. A series of print insertions featuring members and their recipes, along with food-focused digital display assets, were rolled out near the fall and the back-to-school season and ran through the holidays to the end of the year. We also drove engagement and provided utility through digital content and activations. The Sausage Support Center helped moms get dinner on the table with a call-center activation that utilized online, radio and recipe integration. And with the Sausage Dome, a sausage-based Internet cooking show, we inspired watch-party attendees to impress their peers with big-game recipes.

Despite category headwinds, we increased sales volume by 2.1%.

We drove awareness across multiple touchpoints.

-TV awareness of the brand increased by 46% (15% in Q4 2015 vs. 22% in Q4 2016).

-We received over 4.5MM online video views and 25 MM display impressions across both Sausage Support and Sausage Dome content.

We received a positive response from consumers.

-Upon launch, we garnered 90 percent net positive sentiment on social media.

-Ace Metrix, an unsolicited testing agency, scored our commercials and touted them as the “highest achievers in breakthrough” it’d ever seen.

Brand trust was high, despite an increasingly skeptical consumer landscape

-Associations with “Brand I Trust” increased from 62% to 66% across the general population.

-But focusing in on our millennial target, we saw a dramatic shift, increasing from 61% to 79% - a positive change of 30 percent, which is remarkable given millennials’ skepticism of large food companies.