Quality Branded Restaurants
Building NYC dining brands together since 2005
Quality Branded, owners of numerous well-known NYC restaurants including Smith & Wollensky, Quality Meats, and Bad Roman have worked with Walrus since its inception. They are provocateurs by nature, which is maybe why we get along so well.
BRAND CAMPAIGN
Smith & Wollensky
Owning the NYC Streets
Trends come and go, but if there’s one thing that stays the same, it’s Smith & Wollensky. In a world that’s become saturated with Instagrammable experiences, there’s comfort to be found in dining in a place that feels 100% authentic. The Unchanged Since 1977 campaign celebrated S&W’s authenticity, while also acknowledging that they aren’t exactly hip with everything the kids are up to these days.
And there was was no better way to stick to their 1977 roots than to use phone kiosks as our canvas.
When arch-rival Del Frisco’s tried running ads in our same locations, we bought the next flight on all 72 of their kiosks. The day Del Frisco’s ads went down, ours went up.
Sometimes the best way to get traction on social media is to do something in the real world.
LOYALTY CAMPAIGN
Smith & Wollensky
Making NYC’s most famous steakhouse even famouser.
Steakhouse goers are a unique bunch – once they reach a certain age, they pick one and settle down, rarely deviating from their establishment of choice. In order to accelerate this behavior, Smith & Wollensky rewarded patrons who were willing to take a pledge of allegiance, with the utmost piece of flattery: the restaurant would take on their name. Every day for an entire month, the restaurant renamed itself after a different customer.
Antonopoulos & Wollensky – it actually happened!
The campaign won a North American Effie for effectiveness.
BRAND CAMPAIGN
Quality Restaurants
Embracing the Socials
Food influencers love a visual, and with tomahawk steaks, tableside butter service and five foot cheese pulls, Quality Bistro, Meats and Italian deliver. It shouldn’t have been a surpirse when they started blowing up on TikTok and Instagram, yet this sudden social media fame was unexpected, and they didn’t know exactly what to make of it. This campaign embraces that sentiment.
BRAND CAMPAIGN
Maloney & Porcelli
Expense-a-Steak
This was our first really big viral hit. This site, which allowed business people to hide their $400 expense account lunches in a set of printable forged fake office receipts, was named by Ad Age’s Bob Garfield as “One of the cleverest ideas we’ve seen in 25 years of ad reviewing.” In the restaurant, a set of decoy doggie bags also let people sneak their meals back into the office undetected.
