Legal-Ade wins Best PR Idea of 2019 at the One Show
The One Show’s highest honor in Public Relations, plus two Golds, a Silver and a Bronze, the most awarded PR idea of the year.
Country Time is the taste of so many childhoods: a can of powder, a pitcher, a folding table at the end of the driveway. It is also a brand that people had stopped thinking about. Kraft wants to change that, and this spring Buena joined Leo Burnett Chicago to help find the idea.
A classic that had gone quiet
Country Time doesn’t have a product problem. It has an attention problem. Kraft’s goal is to revive awareness of the brand and give people a reason to talk about lemonade again, which is a hard thing to buy with ads alone.
The answer was hiding in the local news.
The law versus the lemonade stand
Across America, kids’ lemonade stands were being shut down for breaking zoning ordinances and health codes. Unpermitted stands were legal in only about 15 states. Each bust became its own small story: a kid, a pitcher of lemonade and a fine.
Nobody was standing up for the kids. For a brand built on the memory of that first stand, that was an opening.
A real injustice
Kids fined for selling lemonade, in story after local story.
A brand with a stake
Country Time belongs to the childhood lemonade stand like no other drink does.
A cheap fix
Fines and permits for a lemonade stand cost little, and mean a lot to a kid.
What came next
The idea became Legal-Ade: a legal defense fund, paid for by Country Time, for any kid whose lemonade stand gets busted. If a stand got fined or needed a permit, Country Time covered it, up to $300 per stand. The launch film put a row of serious lawyers behind a little girl’s stand.
It launched in June, two weeks early, to meet the news of a child in Denver getting busted. Within weeks it had passed a billion media impressions, 99% of them earned, and Denver, Colorado, Louisiana and Tennessee changed their rules. The awards followed, from the 2018 Clios to the One Show’s Best of Discipline in PR in 2019.
The work is credited to Leo Burnett Chicago, with Buena in the ideation. It started with a forgotten lemonade and a kid with a sign.
