Jack in the Box || Fireside Chat

Yeah, it goes well like any brand. When you, you know, Jack's been around for 73 years. When you really look at the history, it's about what are the pillars that made Jack, what made us who we are. One of those things is we really focus on innovation. You heard first breakfast sandwich, we beat McDonald's on a breakfast sandwich. First for the portable salad, first on the two-way speaker box. We continue to elevate and evolve what QSR can and can't do. You haven't been to a Jack in the Box? We have an egg roll on our menu. It is the best damn egg roll you will ever have. We have churros. Our number one selling item is a taco. I sell a lot of tacos. It's about 10% of our business. And most recently, you saw on that video is a Smash Jack. We're taking those industry trends that are popular at food trucks and then how do we make sure we take that innovation and mass produce it. And by being core to our pillar, we can continue to elevate, bring that unique new, the unique voice that we bring to the marketplace, and really make that guest experience as strong as possible through innovation.

Yeah, when as a marketer, I do feel fortunate being a CMO of Jack. I grew up on Jack. I went late night after high school and ate at Jack. College I ate at Jack. And so I'm feeling like I'm running the brand that I was always born to run. And my job as CMO is really to build a strategy that everybody can execute on. And so we have the thing called the Crave Strategy. If you heard me earlier, it's about being culturally relevant, authentic, visible, easy, and distinctive. And what that stands for: are you cultural? What's going on around you? Are you relevant to the needs of the guest? Are you authentic to who you are as a brand? Are you visible with the right message to the right people at the right time? Easy to find and easy to get. And then most importantly, being distinctive. And I think as a marketer, you sometimes find brands that do one thing really well. What I've really kind of coached my team and built a strategy is we try to want to hit on as many of these as possible. If I can be distinctive and authentic as well as culturally relevant, we can really do unique things. Which is you saw through Snoop Dogg. My franchisees despised me for partnering with Snoop Dogg. They despised me. I had to do a survey on the popularity of Snoop Dogg in Texas because my Texas franchisees are like, he's not popular here. And I'm like, it's Snoop Dogg, he's popular everywhere. And they're like, well he's going to get high. And I go, he will not on our commercial. I'm sure he will in the spot. And so it's really about just being authentic. And so when we rolled out Snoop, everyone's like, well this is a partnership we always wanted. And then we also found out like with Ryan Reynolds, that relationship came from all things drinking in a bar. I work at Jack in the Box. We ran into his team and we had a conversation. And he owned Mint Mobile, we had mint shakes. Seemed very easy to create a Mint Mobile shake and really create a unique relationship with Ryan Reynolds and doing the brand differently. We've also partnered with Mark Hamill. Mark Hamill got his start before he became Skywalker. He worked at Jack in the Box. He worked at speaker box. We actually fired him for imitating Jack at the drive-thru. And so we reached out and tried to amend, you know, a year ago and said, hey, do you want to come back and work with us? Since we kind of fired you and created your career. And he was very fortunate and it did really well. And that authentic voice of being true to who you are. It's one thing to say, hey we know who we are, it's another thing to live who we are. And I think that's the part of the brand we're at now, where we are living who we are. We're not afraid to push the boundaries. We are the underdog. We will talk more crap to every other QSR brand in the entire industry. We are the only brand that Wendy's will not go after on X or Twitter. They will not talk to us. We will go after them and they're like, no you guys, you're just too aggressive. And it's just who we are. Because we have a CEO that is amazingly awesome with a big head. And so we just love who we are. And I think you also saw how it's not just the marketing, it's every single consumer touchpoint. Our new store design, you saw the purple and the red. Those are ownable by us and that's how we stand out and be more distinctive. Because when we execute that right now, we're like mustard and ketchup is our colors in our old stores. But by being purple and red and owning who we are, we stand out. And every single store we open in the new look is almost double in sales. And so we have the capability to really stand out and live who we are and actually bring the marketing to the store. I don't know if you saw it was really quick: our slogan is, a burger place famous for its tacos. And by putting that on the store, you start realizing there's something. We kind of say it's a little bit of Austin, we keep it a little weird. That is kind of what we are. We're that weird place that has churros and tacos and burgers and egg rolls.

And there's, I heard earlier today on my panels of people saying, oh, these things happen and I have legal and I have to run this by people. I do not run anything by anybody. I apologize for this, but I grew up in social, I grew up in digital. I'm an ecom guy that somehow got to be a CMO. And I understand the need for speed. I've educated the others around me saying we will deal with the consequences of a cease and desist. And I get about five or six a year. And we know how to handle them. The last one I got was from Corona, because we knocked off their Snoop ad. We started our commercial with Snoop on the beach and Jack walked up and said, hey, you look thirsty, let's go get a drink, or you look hungry, let's get some food after your drink. And Corona did not like that. Luckily they let us run with the spot for eight weeks before they told me to cease and desist, so we got the max run of that commercial. But I think it is twofold: we really create, we put guardrails in place for creatives. We have them create the content in their world, in their voice. I am not creating my brand in my voice to give to them. I'm saying, how does my brand fit in your voice? But it's also what Spotter does for us, is being able to take our content and saying, how do we partner with the right premium content creators to showcase our brand and showcase our ads? And that's where we've also seen a lot of work where it's very contextual, very targeted, and we're talking to the right guests that really drive our brand and drive our products.

The good news is we're back to growing. So we are a San Diego brand. We're born and bred. I people in San Diego don't even know we're born and bred in San Diego. I got to do some better marketing there. But we are a California brand. We're just not in Chicago, not in Florida, not in New York. There's big pieces of the United States that have late night life and parties and like to do things. We are that brand. 30% of our sales happen after 10:00 PM. We're not going after kids. I have a kids menu but it's 0.001% of my sales. And it allows us to be that edgy self. And so as we explore, we have our new store designs. We've had very strong success in Salt Lake City and Louisville. We just rolled out in Mexico, in Chihuahua, our first real international store three weeks ago. And we're going to hit Chicago and Florida hard next year. I see us in New York probably three years from now. We already know how we're going to roll this out. We want to rent out a bunch of bodegas and just start selling our food out of the New York bodegas. And we've already created good relationships with them. So we're really trying to say how do we do things different. How do we own the night? We are a late night brand. It's what we do best. And the other thing we do is all day breakfast. Those other lame brands, 11:00, 10:30. Like who gets up that early for breakfast? We have breakfast all day. So if you want breakfast at 11 o'clock at night, you can come to Jack in the Box. You want tacos at 6:00 AM, you can come to Jack in the Box. So we kind of throw the rules away that the other competitors really hold by, because it's all about simplicity and speed and reducing what your options are. While we actually do the opposite and really have no rules.

Yeah, I mentioned this earlier, and this is, you're always as marketers learning. I mentioned this, that our job is evolving. It started with, you know, I was a digital guy that became a marketer. Marketers are becoming digital guys. It's now the technology side. What are the tech platforms, the solutions? I can't keep up with it. I get about a hundred calls from a hundred different partners saying I have your solve. I don't know who to believe anymore, trying to educate what that technology is, the AI solutions, everything out there. I think the other thing is just the sheer breadth of media out there. I'm still learning. You know, I'm a CMO. I watch TV. I say, where are my ads? I don't see my ads. I eat at Jack in the Box once a week. Why am I not seeing our ads? And my team's like, wait, we are buying ads, you should see our ads. Then we just realized, and I didn't know this, that because I'm one of those lame people that has a Samsung TV that uses the apps on my TV versus a Roku, I do not see our ads unless they're in live sports. Now if you're on Roku, you see my ads so much that you will go to Jack in the Box every hour. And it's just understanding that we're like, okay, that's a channel we missed. Then we're like, what about people have LG TVs? Well, that's another channel we missed. And you start thinking about where people watch video today is becoming challenged. And that's why I think even why we partner with Spotter and why we do certain things, is because we know the audience, we know what they're looking for, and we're able to do the right marketing to the right people at the right time in the video space that sometimes we're not able to do in TV and streaming TV. And it's just going to get worse with Netflix and everybody else having ads. We're trying to find creative ways to reach the same amount of people. I talked to my media company and they said, because my franchisees I have to educate them. You know, sales go up, they think there's money sitting there that now is in a bucket that I can just do things with. And I go, well, video costs have gone up 60%. If I bought the same TV ads five years ago, it costs 60% more now because I have to buy them across three or four different platforms. This is just a challenge that we're dealing with that every brand is dealing with. And I am lucky I have a good budget. It can never be cut. The best thing about if you ever want to work in QSR, work in QSR, because unlike other traditional, I worked at Sears, so I know what it's like to get your budget cut. You cannot get your budget cut in QSR because the franchisees pay for your marketing. So as long as sales work, it can never be touched because it's contractual. So it's a nice place to live. Good or bad, you still have all your money to spend the insight into the business.

Yes. I think you're going to say Whataburger. I know, but they're very heavily influenced on the East. I get it. They have a big presence. We will come in hard and aggressive. Just to let you know how we rolled into Louisville: I used to work for KFC, so when we rolled into Louisville, we bought all the billboards across from Yum! headquarters and it said, get boxes, not buckets. And that's what the whole town said for the next three months. We just talked crap about KFC. White Castle, I would probably do the same thing and say get one nice big burger versus 12 little tiny ones. I don't know.

Because we're not national, we have a lot of local partnerships. We partner with the Astros, the Padres, the Lakers, the Warriors, and now the Diamondbacks. We have a different philosophy. I do not just want a billboard. I do not just want to sign in the stadium. I want to be seamlessly integrated into the sport. And so for the Lakers, anytime the Lakers score and hold under 100, we give away two free tacos. Well, the chant in the stadium is always, we want tacos now. And it's in the video game of EA Sports. So if you watch EA Sports and you're playing the game, it's in there. If you go to the Padres, you see on the foul pole a 900-pound jack head at the foul pole that is now in the video games. And that's literally how we think about that Crave strategy in our partnerships. How do we be distinctive that it would show up in EA Sports on their games? And so we're like, for example, Diamondbacks, I am in line to buy the pool. I want the pool. I want to have little jackhead floatable balls and things in the pool. And that person is still holding on to that license, and I can't wait for it to end and we'll buy that. So this is how we think about the stadiums, how we seamlessly integrate.

Well, I think the number one thing with franchisees is education, because they still think a TV ad is the only marketing thing that's ever existed in life. And so I have a local marketing team. The way QSR works is 4% of my money from the franchisee goes to system big cool stuff, 1% goes to local, and that is to support the stores. And so a lot of this is education: you need to have billboards, you need to have directional signage, you need paid search, you need to have retargeting, geo-targeting around the stores. Franchisees are like, wait, I can talk to everybody within two miles of my store? Yes, you can. And so we take their money, educate them, and a lot for us it's test and learn. So new media comes up, we will say, hey LA franchisee, we want to test XYZ. Let's do it. We test it, we see results, it goes on for the whole system. So I have a team of dedicated four or five people. They also work the local sports deals we just talked about that is locally funded. It's fun because it's their money. The franchisees get to choose where it goes, and we get to kind of build a strategy for it.

Well, we play the song No Sleep Till Brooklyn at our headquarters every time we do a new store opening because we're waiting till we get to Brooklyn. That's the big one. That's the big one.

Thanks for having us, everyone. We'll look for the expansion in our markets.