Lancashire-based ecommerce firm Garadry is scaling up brand awareness stateside ahead of hurricane season with a new television advertising campaign.
The company, based in Ormskirk, commissioned California-based ad agency The Sparkhouse to produce a campaign geared towards US consumers and the ‘Meet Dave’ concept was the result.
The creative concept sees a family man struggling to protect his home from water damage during hurricane season, but finally solving the problem with a GaraDry threshold seal.
The commercial was trialled to positive feedback and last week picked up Gold in the 45th annual US Telly Awards in the online video commercials category. The Telly Awards received 13,000 entries and included winners such as Adobe, Calvin Klein, ESPN, LinkedIn, MTV Entertainment Studios, and PlayStation Studios.
GaraDry designs, manufactures, and sells the world’s largest range of threshold seals for residential garage doors and commercial doors. The company has grown its domestic and international sales dramatically in the last three years and is a proud exporter of British-designed and manufactured products, collecting a Kings Award for Enterprise earlier this year.
GaraDry opened a subsidiary in the USA in 2017 (GaraDry LLC), to handle strong interest in its products and has launched a fulfilment centre in Tennessee to ship transatlantic orders quickly.
Ashley Smith, founder and managing director of GaraDry, said: “We are delighted to expand our new television campaign in several core areas across the USA. We know that television is a hugely influential channel for our brand and enables us to reach our target demographic.
“Our ‘Meet Dave’ campaign tells the story of our core product in a humorous way that resonates with real people. Ultimately, we’ve designed a product for the people, we’re a brand for the people and The Sparkhouse has done a fantastic job in executing it for us.
“This is the second television campaign we’ve launched in the USA and we’ve learned the lessons of how to do things stateside with regards to reach, volume and creative. With ‘Meet Dave’ we think we’ve got a campaign which hits the sweet spot of the American consumer at the point where they will be actively looking at ways to protect their home from damage caused by extreme weather during the hurricane season. By focusing on key locations we know we’ll get the reach and frequency we need to create brand recall and allow us to scale up our marketing to other markets in the United States.”
Smith added that the company’s next step will be to create a UK version of the campaign, and it is already opening discussions with local agencies here in the UK about production and media buying to replicate the campaign domestically later this year.
GaraDry appointed Manchester-based Sugar PR to handle media relations for the brand in 2023.