La Brea Bakery

This artisan bread maker enjoys a cult following in its home market of Los Angeles. When a Swiss food conglomerate gobbled them up, it did what all food conglomerates do: insist on a larger cult.  So La Brea turned to TDH to take the brand national with its first-ever advertising effort. Because artisan products are about handcrafted, small batch, local goods, we didn’t want to rely on mainstream media. We needed to be more stealth, creating brand ambassadors and letting the foodie market discover the brand. The answer was advertising on elite cooking and dining websites like Epicurious.com. This strategy not only felt as natural as the ingredients, it enabled La Brea to monitor the effectiveness of every dollar spent. (Conglomerates really appreciate that.)  We also created a yearlong promotional program for retailers, with plenty of innovative bread occasions to drive incremental display opportunities. The results were quite tasty: Click-through rates were three times the food and beverage average. Weekly traffic to La Brea’s website doubled. And 82% of the traffic was new or unique visitors.