I love when companies take a step beyond the norm in their marketing campaigns, Chili’s current promotion for their "10 under $7" menu is a perfect example.  They’re running commercials now for a fictional restaurant chain, P.J. Blands, and promoting the url http://www.pjblands.com.  Of course, I had to run to my laptop and see what it was all about. 

The high quality and high production values of this site are really impressive.  It’s unique that Chili’s has decided to put so much of their budget into creating a site that’s not exactly for their brand, but an offshoot of one of their commercials. There’s a tremendous amount of slickly integrated video in the site, on all of the sections Mr. Bland introduces his restaurant and products along with himself (he loves beige, what a shock!). I love the "behind the scenes" clips of creating the commercials with the food stylist using woodworking tools to make sure the food looks the best on screen. 

They have even created a game where you can go through the motions of banging out their food yourself. There are lots of games online where you work as a waitress or a cook, (I’ve got two on my iPhone – Hell’s Kitchen and Diner Dash, so this really appealed to me) and this is a really cute take on that concept.  

There’s some clever ways they have brought the Chili’s brand into the site – clicking on any of the menu items takes you to the Chili’s site, and if you stay on the site long enough the top left corner folds down to reveal images of Chili’s delicious food and promotions.  The most creative way of integrating the Chili’s brand is when a Chili pepper floats into screen hoisted by a hot air balloon and gets in the way of Mr. Bland and he waves it away with his hand as if swatting an annoying fly.

To take it one step further, they’ve even created a twitter account for P.J. Bland’s – and although all they seem to tweet about is how they can become a trending topic, it’s still pretty cool that they’re there at all, and they even follow back if you follow them.    My favorite tweet from Mr. Bland so far: "Well I tried to make #Bland a trending topic today, but to my surprise, I noticed it was already there. #Chrysler."

Big props to Hill Holliday for creating this campaign.  It’s the type of thing you pitch to a client but they usually say no to.  It’s really cool that they got to move forward with this idea and have created such a clean and clever site.