Objectives

Cooking can be intimidating, but meal time doesn’t have to be complicated. ShopRite Supermarkets wanted to show customers easy, step-by-step tutorials on how to avoid a “Situation” in the kitchen.

Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and his family, from MTV’s Jersey Shore fame, were a perfect fit for the NJ-based ShopRite chain. Our Millennial shoppers grew up watching Mike on TV and have followed his redemption journey to become the family man that we continue to welcome onto our TV screens today. We find the most authentic influencer sponsorships feature stars that have a strong tie to our trading area and resonate with our next generation of shoppers.

Strategy and Execution

ShopRite filmed five installments of the ShopRite Situation – Sunday Dinner Series. Mike the Situation is famous for acting as the chef in the Jersey Shore house regularly cooking “Sunday Dinner” for his castmates. All featured dishes had an Italian theme – highlighting Mike and Lauren’s most beloved family recipes. The Situations walked the audience step-by-step through the recipes in 5-10 minute cooking segments that featured ShopRite’s Bowl & Basket Specialty product line, imported from Italy.  Videos linked to full shoppable recipes on our website, ShopRite.com.

Video 1: Situation Seafood Salad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQx8rB9h7wY&t=249s

Mike and Lauren showed how easy it is to create a Traditional Seafood Salad, promoting our fresh seafood selection.

Video 2: Arancini a la Situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-2Z7yIQ5Ho&t=198s

The Situations showed viewers their favorite New Jersey Italian restaurant staple and how everyone can create Arancini Rice Balls at home.

Video 3: Spicy Situation Vodka Rigatoni: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJkBfQURwP4

Spicy Sausage Vodka Rigatoni featured an easy, affordable and delicious family dinner.

Video 4: Holidays at the Situation House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FITICrqbqQ

As we entered the busy holiday season, we added another star – 2 year old Romeo Sorrentino. Romeo, Lauren and Mike worked together to put together a ShopRite Bowl & Basket Limited Edition Gingerbread House Kit.

Video 5: Holiday Cookies with The Situations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4scrSVMiDI&t=146s

Mike and Lauren starred in our last holiday film, showing our viewers how to make the classic Italian cookie, pizzelles!

Results

The campaign was a huge success! The videos resonated with our core customers, earning millions of views, kind comments from our viewers and nearly 12k new YouTube subscribers on the ShopRite Stores account!

• The campaign garnered an impressive 18.5M Impressions, of which the Arancini video received 6.4M of those overall impressions.
  • Outperforming benchmarks of 50K impressions
• The total video completion rate was 6.74%, with the Seafood Salad video leading completions at a 13.08% rate.
  • Outperforming benchmarks of 1.5-3% completion rate.
• Our two top performing videos, Arancini and Seafood Salad each had more than 67K video views. Total Video views topped out at 286K.
  • Outperforming benchmarks of 30K video views.

Mike and Lauren shared additional branded content to their channels adding 1M additional video views to the overall results.

Media