NCBA News By Colin Woodall, NCBA CEO
PARDON THE TURKEY For too many years we have allowed turkey to hold a prominent place on American dining tables during the holidays. Enough is enough! Instead of countless conversations about how dry the turkey was, we can provide profuse kudos to the those who deliver a perfectly cooked and delectable beef-eating experience. Although we work closely with our friends in the turkey business on many of the same issues in Washington, D.C., we are still competitors, and competitors do not give free passes to the other party. We are on a quest to take back the holidays and make beef the holiday meal of choice! Your checkoff dollars are pivotal in our quest. NCBA, as a contractor to the Beef Checkoff launched a holiday campaign designed to grab consumers’ attention and have them re-think placing that turkey in the basket. We do that by making their mouths water with our Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner. “Drool Log” that has proven to be so popular. Consumers can’t get enough of the “Drool Log,” and our marketing campaign is capitalizing on their beef desires. We are hitting our consumers daily on broadcast television, digital media, radio and more. I hope you keyed on the broadcast television part, because it is the first time since 2003 we have been able to do this. We are a part of the 2020 Hallmark Channel’s “Countdown to Christmas” event that started before Thanksgiving and runs through Dec. 26. If you have not heard, the Hallmark Channel is the channel to watch for holiday movies and we took advantage of a unique and affordable opportunity. The “Drool Log” is yet another great example of the work done with your checkoff dollars, and it caps off a 28 | Ohio Cattleman | Winter Issue 2021
very successful year of checkoff-funded programs and projects. At least once a week, I receive a call or email asking what the checkoff really does. Well, it really does a lot and we are proud to be one of nine contractors conducting work on behalf of the Beef Checkoff. While 2020 has proven to be chock-full of pain and challenges, we have proven how nimble we can be as a contractor in making the most of checkoff funding. When beef cases were cleaned out, there was no need wasting these precious dollars on promotion because we were selling everything we were producing. Instead, we had to address the fact that refrigerators and freezers across the country were full of beef and, in many cases, our consumers didn’t really know what to do with it. We focused on online cooking lessons and our famous Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner. recipe database to help our friends and neighbors have a fantastic beef meal. When the pandemic continued to keep people at home, we tried to add a little humor with our “Beef Substitutes” campaign that focused on substituting beef for other proteins like taking the squid out of calamari
and using beef to make “cow-lamari”! That set us up for National Beef Burger Day in May and a campaign that reminded our customers that grilling season is only possible because of your hard work and diligence – regardless of the pandemic. Next came our “United We Steak” summer grilling promotion that was wildly successful. Over the course of the summer, “United We Steak” ads were seen over 338 MILLION times! We had over 33 million online radio ad listens, almost 90 million video views, and the campaign drove over one million visits to UnitedWeSteak. com. In addition, we had a 23-story tall billboard in New York City’s Times Square that displayed the map with each state cut out of steak. The bottom-line is that Americans loved “United We Steak”! We are committed to topping all of this with our work planned for 2021. These campaigns are just a fragment of the work that is done with checkoff funding, but we’ll cover those other areas in future articles. Your checkoff dollars are working hard for you each and every day. More importantly, these campaigns also illustrate the importance of the partnership
