Bisto ‘Aah Nights’: how a 1919 catchphrase became a night of the week

Most food brands sell a product. Bisto spent the middle of the last decade selling an appointment, and asked British families to book one evening a week to eat at a table together. The campaign was called Aah Nights, it came from McCann Erickson, and it took a catchphrase invented for two cartoon urchins in 1919 and turned it into a unit of time. Our take: one of the sharpest pieces of occasion-building British food advertising has produced, undermined by an almost total absence of published proof that it worked.

The insight is unglamorous and correct. Gravy is not a purchase decision, it is a consequence of a purchase decision. Nobody buys granules unless somebody is cooking a roast, and by 2005 fewer people were cooking roasts.

Credits

• Client: Bisto, then owned by RHM
• Agency: McCann Erickson
• Art director: Simon Hepton
• Writer: Matt Crabtree
• Director: Rob Sanders
• Production company: Amarillo
• Media agency: Universal McCann
• Digital: Code Computerlove (2007 campaign site)
• Launched: 2005, television, radio and press

The brief: defend a near monopoly against a shrinking occasion

Bisto did not have a share problem. Campaign’s brand profile put it at 62 per cent of a £90m gravy market in 2002, with supermarket own label on 26 per cent and Oxo on 8. By 2005 Grace’s Guide records Bisto holding more than 70 per cent of the British gravy granules market. There was nothing left to take.

A brand in that position has exactly one growth lever, and it is not share. It is frequency. If the category only exists when a family sits down to a cooked dinner, then the way to grow the category is to make families sit down to more cooked dinners.

That is a genuinely difficult brief. You are not asking someone to switch brand, you are asking them to reorganise their week. Most advertisers would have flinched and made a warmer version of the same roast dinner film.

The idea: give the behaviour a name

McCann’s answer was to name the thing it wanted people to do. An Aah Night is one evening a week when the family eats a proper dinner at the table, and the campaign asked people to pick one and keep it. The name did all the heavy lifting, because it turned a vague aspiration into something you could put in a diary and tell other people about.

The word itself was already sitting in the brand’s pocket. Aah, Bisto had been the line since 1919, when the illustrator Will Owen drew two ragged children catching the smell of gravy on the breeze for the brand’s first large campaign. The Bisto Kids became cult figures in the twenties and thirties, returned as animated characters in 1976, and left the advertising in the mid nineties. The sound they made outlived them by decades.

What McCann did was to change the grammar of that sound. Aah stopped being a reaction to a smell and became the name of an occasion. That is a small linguistic move with a very large strategic consequence, because it lets the brand own something that happens whether or not anyone buys gravy that week.

The craft: children saying grace, badly

The best film in the run is the thirty second spot known as Grace, which Campaign covered in October 2006. Rob Sanders directed it through Amarillo, from an art direction by Simon Hepton and a script by Matt Crabtree. The structure is a single conceit: children from around the country, in their own regional accents, recite what they want from the evening in the cadence of saying grace.

The writing is the reason it works. Instead of a list of product benefits it delivers a list of small domestic wishes, and the wishes are specific enough to be embarrassing.

For what we are about to receive; Dad home from work on time, to talk about how I grazed my knee at school, the telly switched off… for this may we all be truly thankful.

Bisto, Grace, McCann Erickson, 2006

Note what is not in that line. There is no mention of taste, no gravy jug in slow motion, no mother being praised for her cooking. The product appears only as something a child hands to a parent while the meal is being made, which keeps Bisto in the frame as equipment rather than as the point.

Casting real children with unpolished accents is the second good decision. A single stage school voice would have made the film a greetings card. A dozen regional ones make it a survey.

The one criticism worth making is that the guilt is doing a lot of the persuading. Telling parents that their children want them home on time is effective and slightly unkind, and the campaign never quite decides whether it is an invitation or a reprimand.

The extension: a pledge, not a website

In November 2007 Premier Foods, which had bought RHM earlier that year, took Aah Night online with a site built by Code Computerlove. It carried recipes, invitation templates you could send to the people you wanted at the table, and a sign up for the campaign pledge. The navigation was built as a kitchen, with a fridge for a homepage.

The fridge is a gimmick. The pledge is not. Asking people to commit publicly to a behaviour, and giving them a tool to invite others into it, is the correct digital expression of an occasion campaign, and it arrived years before most food brands worked that out.

The results: the awkward part

There is no audited effectiveness case for Aah Nights in the public record. No IPA Effectiveness paper, no Effie, no published penetration or frequency data from Premier Foods tying the campaign to a shift in how often families ate together. For a campaign whose entire proposition was a measurable behaviour change, that absence is conspicuous.

What can be verified is context rather than proof. Bisto entered the campaign already dominant, and remained dominant. Attributing that to the advertising would be guesswork, and we do not score guesswork. Our scoring method marks effectiveness on published evidence only, which is why this review carries a low number in that column.

The legacy: from Aah Night to Spare Chair Sunday

The idea did not die when the films stopped. McCann London kept the same strategic spine and pushed it further outwards, most successfully with Spare Chair Sunday, launched in 2014 with the charity Contact the Elderly. It asked households to offer an empty seat at Sunday lunch to an older person living alone.

The launch film followed a real family in Ilkley hosting a ninety three year old neighbour, and almost 900 households volunteered to host. That is a small number in media terms and a very large one in social terms, and it is the closest thing the platform has to a hard result.

Structurally, Spare Chair Sunday is Aah Night with the door open. Same named occasion, same table, wider guest list. A brand platform that can survive that much reinterpretation over a decade is a rare asset, and it explains why Bisto has never had to reinvent itself the way most legacy food brands do.

What to steal

• If you dominate a category, stop selling share and start selling frequency
• Name the behaviour you want, because a named occasion can be diarised and a mood cannot
• Mine your own heritage for the name before you invent one, then change its grammar
• Let the product be equipment in the scene rather than the subject of it
• Cast for accent and imperfection when you want a film to read as evidence
• Build the digital extension around a public commitment, not a brochure
• If you claim a behavioural effect, commission the measurement at launch, not afterwards

The verdict

Aah Nights is a textbook piece of occasion strategy dressed in an unshowy film, and its central move, turning a hundred year old noise into the name of an evening, is the kind of thought most brands never find. It has run in one form or another for two decades and produced at least one genuinely useful piece of social work in Spare Chair Sunday, which is more than most food platforms manage. It is marked down hard on effectiveness because a campaign built entirely on changing behaviour published nothing to show that behaviour changed. Set alongside the campaigns we rate most highly, it is a very good idea that never filed its homework.