How a throwaway idea at the Barkley ad agency became the “Sonic guys”

The assignment was a throwaway: Shoot a rah-rah video for Barkley‘s biggest client — Sonic Drive-In. The feel-good film would be propaganda for the Oklahoma City-based fast-food chain’s 2002 convention of owners and vendors.

The Kansas City advertising agency dumped the project on the creative team of Matt McKay and Pat Piper.

Aw, man, McKay thought. He would rather have worked on almost anything else.

The agency had been pairing McKay and Piper since their first day, in 1998. Before then, their lives ran parallel but never intersected. In Omaha, Nebraska, they had worked for rival agencies before moving to Kansas City.

The video would premiere on a giant projection screen at the summer 2002 Las Vegas convention and likely never be seen again. The project had one caveat: The suits at Sonic wanted the admen to emphasize how quirky menu items such as corndogs, tater tots, pancakes on a stick and cherry limeades made Sonic better than the kings of the drive-thru: McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s.

McKay and Piper didn’t want to do the typical convention bit: a montage of clips from the previous year’s commercials or a “sales were great this year” cop-out video.

“We could have taken the easy way out and done your average sales video,” says McKay, who, at 38, is a year older than Piper. “But if we would have taken the easy way out, we wouldn’t have ended up with what we have.”

McKay and Piper grabbed a video camera and darted for the drive-thrus in McKay’s Volvo S80 or Piper’s Ford Taurus. The idea was simple: Annoy the competitors’ fast-food foot soldiers by asking for menu items offered only by Sonic. McKay and Piper took turns baiting the fry jockeys. Whoever drove usually assumed the mischievous lead, with the passenger covertly filming the banter with a handheld camera, usually concealed under one leg or under the seat. Sometimes their producer, Charlie DeCoursey, rode along. Mostly, they winged it. Piper felt like they were reliving their days of high school high jinks.

Most workers had a “quit messing with me” attitude. The first golden moment came when a Burger King worker asked the guys, “Why don’t you just go to Sonic?”

Piper and McKay compiled the footage for the convention. After it was shown, word came back: It was a highlight. McKay and Piper were relieved to return to real work.

The next summer, Piper and McKay made up one of several creative teams working on a campaign for Sonic’s new breakfast menu. They busted their asses trying to come up with ideas. Sonic wasn’t biting.

McKay and Piper were in an office, brainstorming with Brad Scott, a Barkley creative director. Scott suggested bringing back the hidden-camera video. “Why don’t we make that the campaign to pitch for breakfast?” Scott suggested.

Everyone laughed, but they loved the idea. So did Piper and McKay’s boss, Brian Brooker, then an executive creative director.

McKay and Piper went back out and shot about a half-dozen spots, cut the footage into commercials and presented them to Sonic. Shooting a commercial before a pitch meeting is unusual — most ideas are pitched on storyboards. But McKay and Piper shot cheaply, recording on video rather than film.

McKay and Piper presented the video to Sonic’s president, Pattye Moore.

“We just walked in and pushed Play,” McKay says.

Moore loved the video.

“This is going to be big,” Brooker told them.

Piper says his first thought was, Oh, God, what are we going to do now?

“They were a little iffy at first,” McKay says of Sonic, “because it’s a completely different approach to advertising. I hate to say it, but I think we were even more iffy on it than Sonic.”

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McKay and Piper didn’t catch lightning with the campaign. They bottled an F-5 tornado. The campaign was supposed to last just four months, from September 2003 to the beginning of a new campaign in January 2004. Five years later, the campaign is still going and has become a pop-culture phenomenon. The commercials have given the quirky drive-in an identity and made Sonic as recognizable as McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s. Friends quote the commercials to each other. Fanatics post parodies of the spots on YouTube. Haters write angry letters to Sonic and rip the spots on the Internet.

But before all that could happen, McKay and Piper had to pull together a new kind of commercial.

At an early pitch meeting, Moore, Sonic’s president, asked McKay and Piper how they would proceed.

“We cast some improv comedians,” they told her.

McKay recalls that Moore asked, “What are you talking about?”

“We’ve got to go out and find guys to do this,” McKay and Piper explained.

“It’s you guys,” Moore insisted. “Nobody knows this brand better than you. This is your idea.”

McKay and Piper weren’t so sure. They were funny guys, but funny enough to carry a campaign?

The extra paycheck was enticing, but finally, they passed. Their bosses knew it was the right decision.

“It could have been a really short campaign with Pat and me,” McKay says. “It wouldn’t be nearly as successful.”

So McKay and Piper needed to find the right two guys to execute their brainchild. But casting was a disaster. Piper and McKay flew to Los Angeles and Chicago and auditioned about 150 men with improv backgrounds.

Los Angeles was a bust.

“It was, like, the longest week ever,” McKay says. “You’re sitting there watching these people trying to be real, and they’re all actors. That was painful.”

Piper wondered what they had gotten themselves into. “You know you’re onto something when you know it can go really good or really, really, really bad,” he says.

Among those who tried out in Chicago were improv actors Pete Grosz and T.J. Jagodowski. Both had worked stints at Second City, the influential improv theater that helped launch the careers of John Belushi, Bill Murray, Tina Fey and Steve Carell.

“T.J. came in, and he freaking nailed it,” McKay says. “Pete came in, and he was great.”

“If we didn’t get T.J. and Pete, I don’t think the campaign would be nearly as successful as it is today,” Piper says. “They were naturally friends, so I think that really helped with the chemistry between the two.”

The comics were in place, but McKay and Piper had to pull the rest of the commercial together. They found a Phoenix-based production company, Daily Planet Productions, to rig a car with microphones and hidden cameras. Daily Planet owner Denise Hagerman helped piece together the crew. Piper credits her with helping make the spots a reality.

McKay and Piper knew that they would shoot the spots on video. Video gave them the raw, real, hidden-camera feel they craved. No one was shooting commercials on video at the time. Plus, video is cheaper than film. They could shoot a half-dozen spots in a couple of days, whereas on film, they’d be lucky to get one in the same time frame.

Piper kept thinking that Sonic executives would call it off. Piper imagined the call: Sorry, guys. We lost our head there for a minute, and we’re not actually going to run this campaign.

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Minutes before the first shoot, a Sonic executive asked Piper and McKay how they were going to cut the spots down to 30 seconds. The casting videos had all run three to five minutes.

“We were like, ‘Don’t worry about that. We’ll get that,'” Piper recalls. “Meanwhile, in the back of my head, I’m like, Well, that’s a great question.”

The ads started a war with Sonic’s competition. The commercials opened with a view of a competitor’s building and a pixelated logo. “Not a Sonic,” read the bottom of the screen. Wired like undercover reporters, Pete and T.J. infiltrated McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s, with subversive results.

“We decided to not go quietly into the market and really go in with a bang,” Piper says.

Piper, McKay and their crew followed T.J. and Pete into the drive-thru in a giant white van with tinted windows. They plastered fake logos on the side for “Daily Planet Fly Fishing Tours.” Inside the van, 10 people watched monitors while McKay and Piper fed instructions to T.J. and Pete on walkie-talkies.

There was no script. There were no storyboards. Nothing but an index card with a brief scenario, maybe a couple of starter ideas for the actors. “We give them this little premise, and they’ll take it somewhere so bizarre,” McKay says. McKay and Piper had to be careful not to get caught up in the weird gags. They had to be sure that Pete and T.J. brought their riffing back on topic. Luckily, the actors were naturals at making up bits but keeping them about Sonic, which made the editing simple. “They understand that you can’t just be weird and funny, that you’ve got to bring it back to the product or back to Sonic.”

Crew members didn’t always understand the nature of the commercials. McKay and Piper would shoot a couple of takes, and after a few minutes, makeup people would go in to touch up T.J. and Pete. McKay and Piper would have to pull them aside and tell them to let it go.

“They get on a creative roll, and we don’t want to interrupt that,” Piper says. “We want to keep this as real as we possibly can and not make it too staged or too commercial-like.”

In an early spot, McKay and Piper wanted to point out that Sonic offers coconut flavoring in its drinks. T.J. and Pete asked an unsuspecting drive-thru worker (face pixelated and voice distorted to conceal the employee’s identity) to crack open a coconut (which the actors provided) and add the milk to their drinks.

“They actually tried to crack it open,” Piper says. “Some woman drummed up a hammer and some kind of chisel, and they actually cracked it open.”

The woman wouldn’t add the coconut milk to their drinks, but she handed T.J. and Pete their opened fruit and let them add it.

To make the point that Sonic doesn’t nuke its hamburgers in microwaves, T.J. and Pete asked a competitor’s cashier to microwave a bag of popcorn for them. “They would be like, ‘We can’t microwave your popcorn. We’re busy microwaving burgers,'” McKay says. “The smarter, more strategic stuff, that’s when we knew that it was bigger than a prank or a Jackass-kind of thing. That’s when we knew it was good.”

Pete and T.J.’s antics became brasher and more irreverent. In a traffic-jammed drive-thru lane, T.J. called the restaurant and asked if the restaurant could use a hand in speeding up the line.

In another spot, Pete and T.J. were hawking Sonic’s french-toast sticks. Burger King was also offering french-toast sticks, but the bread was smaller than Sonic’s. T.J. and Pete went through the drive-thru and demanded a free second order because, they claimed, a gust of wind had blown theirs out the window.

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Shooting wasn’t without complications. A Wendy’s manager spotted a mic hooked to a sun visor and threatened to write down their license-plate number. McKay and Piper thought their cover was blown. They imagined the manager alerting the rest of the chain to be on the lookout for Pete and T.J. Their fears were unfounded.

Pete and T.J.’s TV spots also made them recognizable, and it was more difficult for them to go undercover.

The “Two Guys” commercials opened in 15 markets. The commercials ran heavily in Phoenix, a Sonic hotbed and the location of the initial commercial shoots. A friend of McKay’s attended a backyard barbecue in Phoenix at which NFL quarterback Daunte Culpepper was telling stories of Pete and T.J.’s shenanigans. The conversation lasted an hour, with everyone debating which spot was the funniest. McKay’s friend called him the next day and told him about Culpepper “hyping the boys up” about the Sonic commercials.

“When I heard that story, I thought, Wow, we might be onto something here to actually get people to replay [it],” Piper says. “You want to create something that gets into the pop-culture fold and becomes something that people pass on to each other. Ultimately, TV is an entertainment medium, and if we can entertain people while also promoting Sonic, that’s a great thing.”

Sonic and Barkley tweaked the campaign in 2004. They didn’t want to attack the competition anymore. They moved the setting to Sonic.

“When we first decided that, I was kind of scared. I thought we had to be competitive,” McKay says. “I quickly found that it’s actually better not to be competitive. Why even bring up the competition? It’s like, what we have to offer and our brand are so strong, let’s just talk about ourselves.”

The commercials were like no others on TV. The video was washed out. The actors took on personas, with Pete playing the straight man and T.J. the hyperactive, wacky friend. They’d play off each other and hawk a product, and then a hard slap sound would smack the scene into a freeze frame. Red lettering highlighted a product or a special.

The Sonic guys attained cult celebrity status. People loved the commercials. Praise-filled calls and letters flooded Sonic’s Oklahoma City headquarters. Sonic had never seen an ad campaign generate such feedback, says Dominic Losacco, a vice president of marketing at Sonic. “We saw pretty immediate results in sales and ad awareness,” Losacco says.

Fans made their own commercials and posted them on YouTube. “You don’t see people mimicking McDonald’s commercials,” Losacco brags.

Though many loved the commercials, a crowd of loud critics claimed to change the channel every time the spots aired. Last December, T.J. told the Chicago Sun-Times that he met a woman who worked for Sonic and handled the hate mail. “She goes, ‘Hello, I handle all your hate mail.'” T.J. asked if it kept her busy, and she replied, “Oh, yeah. You wouldn’t believe it. Nine to five every day. A lot of people hate you.”

Sonic wasn’t deterred by the negative responses.

“They stuck it out, and they said, We’re not going to let a couple of these bad e-mails derail us because for every bad e-mail we get, we get 10 good ones,” McKay says. “It took a lot of guts on their part to trust in this campaign.”

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Sonic’s trust has paid off. The campaign has been hailed as one of the top fast-food campaigns. The ads have won more than 100 awards — including 42 Gold Kansas City ADDY Awards and three best in shows; four gold and six silver National ADDY Awards; and made two shortlists at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, the advertising industry’s most prestigious event.

Every idea has an expiration date,” reads a sign inside Barkley’s renovated office downtown. Five years after the Sonic ads debuted, they remain popular.

Still, Sonic wanted the campaign to evolve into “the next couple and pair” — a new set of faces.

The buddy humor of Pete and T.J. wasn’t going to sell salads. Sonic and Barkley knew that they had to expand the campaign. They set out to find the “Sonic couple” in 2005.

Piper and McKay discovered Molly Erdman, a member of Chicago’s Second City. And they cast Brian Huskey in New York City, where he was a player for the Upright Citizens Brigade, an improv theater and school in New York City and Los Angeles. Molly and Brian clicked immediately as a couple who lovingly pick at each other.

They’ve since added “girlfriends” — Second City performers Katie Rich and Sayjal Joshi — to the campaign. The girlfriends commercial, in which Katie sassily asks Sayjal if she wants fries with her shake and a clueless Sayjal says yes, is now broadcast nationally.

Barkley has also expanded the campaign to include online initiatives with Pete and T.J. — “Make T.J. drink” and “Tot rejection.” And in a nod to those who had created their own YouTube ads, T.J. and Pete issued the “YouTube Challenge” to fans of the commercials to make their own. T.J. and Pete gave out awards to the best commercials.

Meanwhile, T.J. and Pete expanded their résumés with roles in the 2006 Will Ferrell movie Stranger Than Fiction. Pete also writes for The Colbert Report.

The continued success of the campaign is up to Piper. He has taken over the campaign, with the title “vice president, group creative director.” He has tried to maintain the raw feel of the commercials. Now, a group of Barkley creative employees helps throw out ideas for the commercials.

“The biggest thing with the creative person is that you always think that eventually you’re going to lose that spark,” Piper says.

McKay left Barkley after three years of working on the Sonic campaign. He moved to Las Vegas and worked on the “What happens in Vegas … ” campaign for that city’s R&R Partners. He has since moved to New York City and is with the ad agency Merkley and Partners, where he works on the campaign of Sonic competitor Arby’s.

“It definitely did some good things for all of us,” McKay says. “Hopefully, sometime soon we beat it, or I beat it or do something better.”

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