Cracking the Egg Marketing Code With Ed Hoffman Podcast

Edward (Ed) Hoffman was the Vice President of Marketing and Communications at the American Egg Board, the producer-funded national organization that increases demand for US eggs through research, education, and promotion. In this role, Ed directed integrated marketing across consumer, retail, foodservice, manufacturing, and export audiences while supporting industry reputation and growth. Drawing on more than 25 years in food marketing, he brings expertise in brand strategy, research, communications, product launches, and stakeholder engagement.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[1:39] Ed Hoffman’s journey into food marketing and the egg industry
[3:28] How agency experience influenced Ed’s leadership and partnership style
[7:40] Why increasing egg consumption matters more than reaching new households
[8:57] Developing campaigns that encourage consumers to use eggs in new ways
[12:34] Ed’s approach to building meaningful creator relationships
[22:12] What immersive platforms can offer food and beverage marketers
[28:47] Measuring campaign performance and connecting marketing to business growth
[36:03] Ed’s perspective on AI, audience insights, and career development
[43:58] Ed’s career advice, commitment to mentoring, and emphasis on self-advocacy

In this episode…

When nearly every household already buys eggs, growth depends less on awareness and more on inspiring new habits. How can marketers make such a familiar staple feel fresh, useful, and worth reaching for more often?

Food marketing expert Ed Hoffman says that the answer lies in increasing usage rather than simply reaching more households. By identifying consumers most likely to change their habits, marketers can focus on addressable barriers, create campaigns around new occasions, and use research to support bold experimentation. Ed also highlights the value of creator relationships, immersive media, and real-time measurement, showing how relevance and engagement can turn a commodity into a stronger platform for growth.

In this episode of The Missing Ingredient, CJ Bruce talks with Ed Hoffman, then Vice President of Marketing and Communications at the American Egg Board, about cracking the egg marketing code. Ed explores audience targeting, creator partnerships, and campaigns that increase consumption. He also touches on immersive media, AI, measurement, and career self-advocacy.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments:

“Our challenge is velocity, getting people to use more eggs more often.”
“We want them to break habits that they’re used to and kind of think beyond the expected.”
“The engagement piece is really the sign of content resonating, stories resonating.”
“You need to be constantly building the plane as you were flying it.”
“No one is going to ever look out for your career more than you.”

Action Steps:

Define your highest-potential audience: Focusing on consumers most likely to change their behavior helps concentrate resources where growth is achievable.
Build campaigns around solvable customer barriers: Addressing practical obstacles, such as not knowing when or how to use a product, gives people more reasons to engage with it regularly.
Maintain relationships with proven creators: Nurturing past partnerships can generate authentic advocacy, stronger engagement, and more value from earlier investments.
Use research to support bold experimentation: Grounding new ideas in audience insights makes test-and-learn campaigns more strategic, credible, and measurable.
Take ownership of your professional growth: Speaking up, volunteering, and pursuing new opportunities helps you build the experience needed to lead bold marketing initiatives.

This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency that believes a better future starts with food. They partner with purpose-driven brands to drive growth through smart, results-focused marketing — without the “set it and forget it” approach.

From brand awareness and paid media to content, influencer partnerships, and loyalty programs, they act as true strategic partners invested in your long-term success.

To learn more about how they help food and beverage brands grow with impact, visit themissingingredient.com today.

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Full Transcript

Introduction and Guest Background

Intro: 00:01

Welcome to The Missing Ingredient podcast with CJ Bruce, where food and beverage founders, operators and experts share the real strategies behind building successful brands. Let’s jump into today’s show.

CJ Bruce: 00:15

Hey, I’m CJ Bruce and welcome to the show. This is the podcast where founders and leaders of high impact food and beverage brands who are serious about scaling. Each episode, I sit down with the people who power the food and beverage industry, brand operators, agencies, vendors, creators, and retailers to uncomplicate the strategies that take brands from early traction to serious scale.

This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency with over a decade in the industry. We take a different approach, starting with your business goals, looking at the full picture and building a marketing strategy that actually ties back to growth. From content performance marketing to influencer partnerships and AI powered workflows. We are an extension of your team, not just another vendor. Learn more at themissingingredient.com.

Now for today’s guest. Ed Hoffman oversees global marketing for the U.S. egg industry to accelerate demand for eggs and egg products. His team runs integrated Marcom programs to reach consumers, food and beverage manufacturers, foodservice service operators, and retailers. The American Egg Board is 100% funded by farmers, producing over 90 billion eggs per year. Welcome to the show Ed.

Ed Hoffman: 01:18

Thank you. It’s good to see you. And thanks for having me. Yeah.

Building a Career in Food and Agricultural Marketing

CJ Bruce: 01:22

Happy to have you here. Okay. Let’s start pre eggs. So you spent, you know, over 25 years in food marketing with some big name agencies and your own consultancy. So I’m curious, you know, what, what brought you into food and beverage or food in the first place and what keeps you coming back?

Ed Hoffman: 01:39

So I kind of fell into the food industry. It was my kind of first official job out of college, and it was with a market research and consulting firm called Technomic. They specialize in the food service industry, the B2B side, and that’s how I started in the industry. and I never left. I just I really enjoyed it.

It is there’s people, you know, people gotta eat. So it’s relatively recession proof. There’s always kind of an opportunity there. And I knew I really wanted to work on the marketing side. So after a few years of technomic, I moved on to work at Ketchum.

And from there, I just, you know, led to a series of jobs, you know, working in communications. And I, and I spread across, you know, I got out of B2B and I intentionally started working more with consumer facing and retail and then found my way working in agriculture. And that’s where I spent a majority of my time, to be honest, since about 2009, still did some brand work here and there. But, you know, agriculture then always became or agricultural marketing always became, you know, it was a big part of kind of the work I was doing. And even though I’ve worked in this industry my entire career, I actually don’t even like to cook.

I love to eat out. I love to grocery shop, love farmer’s markets. But yeah, I am, I am not the cook in the family here, so it’s kind of a dirty secret about working in this business this long.

CJ Bruce: 03:03

I like it getting the secrets out early. Yeah. That’s great.

Ed Hoffman: 03:07

On the table.

CJ Bruce: 03:09

Perfect. You also had, you know, unique experiences working both agency and in-house, you know, moving into the in-house the commodity category. So can you talk a little bit about just that mindset shift, where you go from, you know, advising brands from an agency perspective to actually being the one in-house, making the calls and now you’re working with agencies. Talk a little bit about.

Moving From Agency Partner to In-House Leader

Ed Hoffman: 03:28

Yeah, I know, and that’s very true to this day. So it probably took me a year, I think, to really, you know, completely, you know, be very, you know, comfortable, I guess comfortable is probably too strong of a word. But, you know, to really feel like the client. Yes, I work, we work with several different agency partners. And so I think I kind of bring a depth of kind of empathy and, you know, acknowledgment in terms of, you know, their world.

And I think that’s what makes for great client agency partnerships. So I really try to show up as the client, you know, that I always had wanted to work with or, you know, or felt like I had a good relationship with. But, you know, after spending so many years working in client service, working in agricultural marketing, there’s a lot of similarities between that. I mean, my clients are farmers. I mean that those are our stakeholders.

And so and my team very much has that kind of perspective. All of us at the American Egg Board do. These are our clients. And so that kind of decades long experience of client service, I think, you know, it was very natural for me, you know, on this side of the side of the table to apply, like all those things that I learned working in client service and making sure our farmers are taken care of and they’re prioritized and that we’re good stewards of their money, you know, because that’s how we’re funded is by assessments from farmers. So yeah, it probably took about a year to get totally used to it, but it is great to be in that driver’s seat in terms of making those decisions in greenlighting those programs that you want to do and, you know, really enjoyed it.

It’s been just over three years since I joined.

CJ Bruce: 05:01

That’s great. And you just touched on it a little bit with the, you know, what the American Egg Board actually does. So before we get into some specifics, it’d be helpful for, you know, ground people like you don’t sell eggs, right? You’re, you’re, you’re representing farmers. So how do you explain kind of the highest level?

Like what is the American Egg Board and, and what does it do?

How the American Egg Board Drives Demand

Ed Hoffman: 05:20

Sure. And you know, so, you know, commodity boards or agricultural marketing boards, that is their role is to market the commodity. So we don’t technically sell anything. Our farmers do certainly to retailers and customers. And that our job and you said it you know, said it in our intro here.

Our job is to really grow sustained demand and to do it as quickly as possible through a wide range of activities. I mean, I oversee all of marketing, you know, for the organization, but we have a big investment in innovation, driving. Innovation for new ideas and new uses for eggs, and even developing new egg products. There’s a big export market presence that we need to grow internationally. So yeah.

Our job is to drive, you know, drive demand or grow sustained demand for egg and egg products. And that’s kind of the mission of what we do. So my, our program that I oversee, you know, we target consumers. We have a very well defined consumer target audience. We also have a big investment our farmers are making in channel marketing or B2B marketing.

So priority CPG categories, as well as in food service. And we’re really focused on QSR and full service side of the the food service industry. And we have campaigns, you know, targeting those, you know, product developers, executive chefs, and of course, the marketing leadership, you know, that sets strategies at CPG and food service.

CJ Bruce: 06:53

Yeah, so, so many different angles in there. That’s cool.

Ed Hoffman: 06:56

I should say for both those audiences, you’re fully integrated programs, you know, paid, earned, shared owned. I mean, across the board. So they all kind of center around, you know, kind of, you know, a very shared go to market strategy. And then, you know, the fun part, all the activations and the tactics that come to support and bring that to life.

CJ Bruce: 07:16

But yeah, we’ll definitely get into some of those campaigns today. Yeah. I think as we kind of transitioning to that part of the conversation, I think the, you know, talking about penetration versus velocity, I just want to touch on this a little bit. Like I think you said, over 90% of households have eggs in the fridge. So how do you think about yeah, the, that kind of velocity versus penetration from a marketing perspective?

Ed Hoffman: 07:40

Sure. So and I always have to be very mindful about how I state this statistic to make sure my, my head of insights doesn’t come after me. But so at any given time in the past 12 months, eggs are in 90%, almost 90% of households. So again, we don’t have a penetration problem in terms of getting eggs physically into the kitchen or into the refrigerators. Our challenge is velocity getting people to use more eggs more often.

So and that directly informs, you know, the programs we do that directly face consumers. We have a whole new business development team in terms of doing retail partnerships, you know, to get consumers to put eggs in a basket. And then certainly on the, you know, the B2B side of things, you know, encouraging CPG product developers, you know, to use eggs in, you know, new, you know, new products that you can buy at retail or food service operators, you know, for menus. So.

CJ Bruce: 08:36

Nice. Well, let’s dig in some campaigns. So I think there’s some really interesting stuff that you’ve done in this. I think one, I wanted to start with the, the Meant to be Broken campaign. And so, yeah, could you just tell us a little bit about what it is, where the idea came from?

And I know the main focus here was targeting younger consumers. Right. So you talk a little bit about about that. Yeah.

The Strategy Behind the Meant to Be Broken Campaign

Ed Hoffman: 08:57

So when I, when I first joined on, when I first joined the board, the first thing we did was to identify who is our target audience. You know, we, we really needed to bring that kind of, you know, centrality to our programming and like, what is our North Star? You know, one, let me back up. We know what our North Star is to drive demand and to accelerate demand. But what consumer, who is this person that’s going to give us that biggest opportunity?

So we spent, you know, a number of months, you know, really identifying who that person is based on primary research that we’ve done in secondary research. And then really define, you know, beyond just sort of demographics, but even about, you know, from a behavioral standpoint, from a life stage standpoint to really hone who that audience is. And then part of that was understanding what their addressable barriers are. So we look at, you know, we’re looking at consumers who are already at customers that are probably on the heavy side of like the lights. If you have light, medium, and heavy, it’s those that are on the heavy end of the light category, if you will, and then medium users, so does that.

So let me pause. Let me make sure that that, that makes sense. So light users who do use them frequently and then medium users, because we feel that audience, you know, has the greatest potential to, to grow heavy users, we’re not going to walk away from them. We’re still going to continue to show them the love. But heavy users probably aren’t going to really eat many more eggs than they are today.

And if our job is to accelerate demand, we need to find that target you know, that we feel has the greatest potential. Conversely, if you’re a light user and maybe you just use them in baking, but you don’t like the taste of eggs, you don’t like the texture, I can’t really help you with that. So I’m not going to really spend any resources trying to convince you to like the taste of eggs. I’m going to focus on people who are already fans. Give me more reasons to like them.

And so we do have a very clear addressable barriers. I don’t know what to do with them beyond breakfast. I can help you with that. I don’t know how to make them taste better. We can help you with that.

So that’s kind of where our focus comes from. And from that, our big insight and that ladders to sort of our organizational goals is to get people to eat eggs outside of the familiar. We want them to rediscover eggs. We want them to break habits that they’re used to and kind of think beyond kind of the expected. And that’s what inspire our Meant to be Broken.

So it’s they’re Meant to be Broken campaign is like breaking the rules, breaking habits, breaking away from the familiar and using eggs outside of their familiar occasions, you know, use them for lunch and dinner and snacking. Huge. There’s so much potential for them outside of it. And by the way, we want you to use a lot of them. And so that’s where the whole velocity message comes from.

So yeah, that was the whole point of the campaign or the spirit of the campaign rather.

CJ Bruce: 11:54

Yeah. That’s great. I think, I mean, I love that, you know, you said just identifying that kind of key segment of the market where there’s the most room for growth, and then how do you approach that and make that happen? So that’s yeah, that’s really interesting. I want to go into talk a little about the earned creator strategy.

And so, you know, a lot of earned creators, and this is a conversation I actually had with our mutual friend of ours, Jeff Smith from JS2PR.

Ed Hoffman: 12:20

Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.

CJ Bruce: 12:22

And so curious, you know, we do a lot with, with paid creators, some with earn creators. I think, you know, many brands want to have an earned creator strategy. And how do you navigate that? How do you make that work? So can you talk a little bit about how you’ve approached it?

Building an Earned Creator Network

Ed Hoffman: 12:34

Sure. So we’ve worked with a range of paid influencers over the years. Even before I started, Some were larger, you know, kind of macro influencers, you know, more kind of spokesperson celebrity level. And then some of the, you know, kind of mid tier, if you will. And so we, we worked with them and kind of one off activations and then sort of moved on to the next year or the next group.

And so we had this large group of, you know, people we’d worked with in the past and we weren’t really doing anything to sort of maintain those relationships. You know, our farmers made an investment in that work. We should, at a minimum, maintain the relationships with them, particularly if they really performed for us. And, you know, and consumers resonated with, you know, resonated with their content. So, so we kind of loosely formed this network of earned creators.

We call them our Edgbaston. And there’s a bazillion puns here at the egg board, as you can imagine with eggs, but we call them our egg embassadors. It is an earned creator network, and the origins of it were previous paid influencers we had worked with, and it was an opt in. You know, we invited you to participate in this and we were going to send you, you know, we’ll send you prompts, you know, to encourage you, you know, to develop content, we’ll send you incentives around it. And there’s, you know, opportunities, you know, for us to further engage.

So that was sort of the genesis of it. And at that point, it was just maintaining contact and sort of encouraging them, you know, to, to post. And there was no real kind of rhyme or reason to that. It was just let’s just kind of get our feet wet in this space. So then we decided to make an investment in one of the influencer platforms and actually add some more strategy around it and be far more proactive and actually recruiting earned influencers to this network.

And this platform allows you to do that. We work with Tagger. That’s the platform that we work with. So it allows us to identify potential influencers based on, you know, a range of criteria because we want to make sure that we are reaching our target audience. And so the platform allows us to do that to actively recruit.

And we’ve had a big initiative around recruiting earned influencers. We’re at 119 right now. We’ve added a lot more just this year alone. We also developed a whole program around it as well. So we have, you know, we have this big welcome gift that everyone receives, you know, who signs on because you do have to qualify.

I mean, it’s not a rigorous process. You want to make sure that they’re going to be relevant, you know, to our target. So this big welcome package that goes out to them and there’s sort of like, I don’t know, tears, for lack of a better word that we have around influencers if they engage. So if they, you know, if they’re becoming more and more consistent and regular influencers, when we are prompting them, you know, there’s additional surprise and delights that we’ll send to them. There’s opportunities for us to put put paid behind their content as well.

We incent everybody, you know, to defray, you know, some of those costs because, you know, these influencers are generally more on the nano micro side and they’re really trying to establish their businesses. A lot of them, you know, and they’re in kind of what they’re doing. So. So we have kind of a whole kind of series of ways that we can, you know, engage with them and activate them. They’ve been really responsive.

I would say we do about one prompt a month and it’s tied directly tied either into our campaign or something that’s very timely. So right now we have a very huge focus, organizational wide on driving consumption, moving volume. There is an oversupply of eggs in the market right now, and we are really trying to help our farmers move that with more, I think, kind of more kind of assertive tactics on by that extra carton. So we have an act. We have a program that’s actually going on right now, and it’s called Double the Eggs, and it’s doubling the eggs that are typically called for in boxed like cake and brownie and pancake mixes.

And the response we just sent this out the other day, we’ve already have several that have already engaged, you know, on it. So it’s that kind of thing that that really helps, I think, stimulate a program. It’s, and also, I think kind of gives a sense of like how interested people are in the topic, the fact that we have a few earned creators that are already developing content on it. There’s something there that’s resonating. There’s something there that’s resonating.

So yeah, so that’s how the program started. And, and this year, we are like full speed ahead on it because it’s a very low cost, relatively speaking, way of engaging, you know, creators that are that love, you know, love to create food content and are big fans of eggs.

CJ Bruce: 17:31

Interesting. I a few follow ups there. I’m curious with the you talked a little bit about the incentives, right. Incentivizing. I think that’s a question that comes up where, you know, why are they going to post?

And so it seems like there’s, there’s a community aspect. There’s a surprise and delight aspect. There’s this potential of, you know, paid promotion behind your posts. And for smaller craters, that’s getting them additional reach. Anything else in there that you feel like resonates to, you know, get these craters.

Ed Hoffman: 17:57

One of the things that we have, we have not, I want to say we haven’t, like, we haven’t activated it, let’s say, because we haven’t had the need, but or haven’t had not the need. We haven’t had the opportunity yet. But one of the things that we would like to do is include them maybe in some of the other programming. So for example, we do you know, we do, you know, media partnerships with some of the larger media organizations like Hearst, for example. So why couldn’t we include a few of our really, you know, prolific creators and invite them to come and pay for them to come and join in something that they may not normally be invited to or have as easy access to, because maybe they’re just not located, you know, in the right, in the right area.

So that’s another another sort of opportunity, if you will. But we also don’t want to turn it into something where here are the different tiers. And if you keep posting, you can climb to this tier of this tier. There’s something that feels very contrived in that and sort of undermines the spirit of this program, which is these are people who love to post food content and are big fans of eggs, and we want to give them as much freedom to do that and support them in any way that we can, you know, around that. So it’s not to say we might not do that, but it’s, you know, this is this is how new this program is.

And when I, when I talked to some of my colleagues at other boards, you know, basically just to kind of what are you guys doing? And, you know, what do you think about this? There’s not a lot that’s been done on that on this earned side. And maybe that’s just because, you know, earned influencers typically, as I mentioned, you know, in our experience have been smaller. They’ve been more of the kind of nano or the micro.

Well, those creators are the ones that our audience loves. They prefer them because there’s a sense of discovery. There’s a sense of, I found this person and I want to share it on my network. So it really makes a lot of strategic sense for us. And, and again, it’s performing, you know, the, the earned influencers that we’re working with, you know, it’s performing.

So that’s, that’s kind of where we’re at right now. Listen, we could have this call in another month and something could have changed. But right now what we’re doing.

CJ Bruce: 20:10

Yeah, it’s great. I appreciate you going to the detail on that. I think it’s you know, we’ve also seen like the micro nano, you know, more engagement there and the collaboration there and response from audiences makes a lot of sense. And I think it’s, it’s, you know, interesting to just hear the nuanced approach. You know, it’s like finding that balance of, you know, incentivizing enough to do things, but not so much that it feels contrived.

Like you said so.

Ed Hoffman: 20:32

And you just touched on something that is is really important for our program around engagement, you know, versus necessarily awareness. And I think we are fortunate because, you know, we’re in 90% of homes and eggs are pretty indispensable in people’s lives. You know, even when prices were really high a year ago, you know, people were still buying eggs. I mean, demand didn’t really dip down to significantly because they are so indispensable. They are so, you know, part of people’s lives.

And we’re very mindful of that and, you know, grateful for that. And we want to make sure that we’re meeting the moment, you know, when that when those moments arrive. But I think I think the other thing too, with, you know, of that size is so we don’t have an awareness problem. You know, there’s a lot of egg content out there and we are constantly looking at it. We are constantly trying to do like opportunistic boosting for some content that might be trending, and we’re very fortunate to be in that spot.

We don’t really have an awareness problem around eggs, but the engagement piece is really the sign of content resonating, stories resonating. And, you know, in Nano and Micro-influencers are just perfect for that. You know, there’s just a great, a great group of creators to work with.

Bringing the Egg Brand Into Roblox

CJ Bruce: 21:47

Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, I want to shift into another campaign that was, you know, out of the box, which is Roblox. So Tower of Egg on Roblox, I think I love the idea of, you know, a Roblox game. And so I want to know about the campaign itself.

And I’m also curious about, you know, pitching a Roblox game to a bunch of farmers and agriculture people. Like, how did that come about?

Ed Hoffman: 22:12

Well, I think a couple of things. So one, the, the immersive media or gaming, you know, but we try to refer to it more as immersive media because that’s really kind of what we’re bringing to the table here is very much part of the Meant to be Broken campaign. It is not a standalone program. It is very much in the spirit of that campaign, which is, you know, inspiring consumers to use eggs in different ways. And I think what’s so amazing about the immersive media experience and the Tower of Eggs that we did, which was an obstacle course, like a four level obstacle course, and each level was a different kind of recipe you had to create, which was unexpected and not familiar.

And is the higher the more levels you went, the more difficult you know, the game becomes. And so it was very much on strategy with what we were doing. It was a it was an unapologetic test and learn type of activation. It was new for us. And frankly, it’s new for the gaming space for commodity board or, you know, to be engaged in that way.

There are some food brands that certainly are in there. But so that was sort of a test and learn about this. This makes strategic sense. Our target audience. Oh, I didn’t tell you.

We call them explorers. Again, lots of puns around here, but but our target audience gaming, gaming influencers, overindex for both men and women in our target and are the highest activity. You know that for influencer engagement. So and that that really resonated with us as a team. So if our audience, the number one kind of influencer that they’re really looking at are gamers, why aren’t we in gaming?

Because they clearly have an interest there. That’s why this makes sense. So when you talk about how do I sell this into, you know, farmers or how do I pitch this to farmers? Is it all has to go back to our insights and research, and this is what our insight says. This is what our research says.

This is how this connects. And I would argue after actually making food in your own kitchen, doing it digitally in an immersive media experience is pretty darn close to, you know, actually making the product itself. And of course, you’re hoping you can connect somebody to think, I’m going to make this or make something like this, you know, taking away from the game. It was the most successful from a performance metrics awareness and engagement activation in our entire campaign. When we launched.

People were spending up to six minutes in this game, which is huge. I mean, I am admittedly not a gamer, but everything that I have learned about, about that space up to six minutes. You know, is huge. So we worked with a partner called Coop Ventures. They’re sort of the intermediary between us and Super League, and we’ve worked with them now twice.

We also continue Tower of Eggs last year, and we’re looking at doing something different with them this year. But clearly, I mean, the space, the space is relevant for our audience. And so that’s why, you know, we leaned in on leaned in on that type of activation.

Combining Primary, Secondary, and Audience Research

CJ Bruce: 25:20

That’s great. There’s a couple of things I wanted to call up in there. One, going back to just overall research, and I’m curious, I guess, how you’ve approached that research. Are you doing surveys, working with research partners, you know, access to research tools or just, you know, start there? Just how do you think about how’s the research actually happen?

Ed Hoffman: 25:41

So some of that, so this is all what I mentioned, that we developed this very well defined target audience. When I first started, there were several different inputs. One was primary research that we had conducted over the years, the American Egg Board, we make, we make our farmers make a huge investment in original research, which is huge for a commodity board, and let alone to have a team on staff to kind of measure is actually kind of unusual in my experience. Anyway. So we had that input.

Then we also have a lot of secondary and syndicated research that is relevant to the category grow that in our main agency partner Ketchum, using their Omnicom earned ID tech stack. That opens up a wide range of possibilities to better understand who this target audience is. And this starts filling in the gaps in terms of interests, some of the psychographic types of things. What do they like? What do they don’t like?

Where do they eat? What kind of media their consumption? Is that whole profile kind of around that piece of it out. So a lot of that came from the compilation of all of this together, all this research together. And then we spent, you know, the next kind of six months, I would say we had some studies that were already planned.

And so we sort of built that plan a little bit while we were flying it. So we were pressure testing our target. Like, let’s put a stake in the ground based on what we know today. And then let’s move forward. And, you know, let’s not let perfection, you know, get in the way of good enough.

And I think in this world about how quickly marketing changes, I think you need to be constantly building the plane as you were flying it. And you need to often be often test and learn. And, you know, again, not just throwing stuff up against the wall. I mean, it has to be some it has to be informed with strategy and, and sort of a rationale. But and that’s what we did.

And we test and learned as we went. And we refined this target, but felt really good about where we, you know, really good about where we were at after a year of doing that. And now any research study that we do, if it’s not just focused on our target, we always over sample, you know, to make sure that we’re capturing, you know, research findings and insights, you know, for our target to inform that program.

CJ Bruce: 27:55

Got it.

Ed Hoffman: 27:56

Yeah. Does that answer your question about kind of where that came from for. Okay.

Measuring Campaign Performance and Business Impact

CJ Bruce: 28:00

I think digging in. Yeah, it’s it’s an interesting space because I think like there’s often at least we’ve experienced, you know, resistance to research in certain ways or certain, you know, clients or depending on the stage of the business and like, what depth do you go and where do you get, you know, what are the sources? How do you synthesize all that information. So yeah. Yeah, I think it’s helpful to have some of that context.

The next thing I was going to ask you touched a little bit on, on performance throughout all these, these pieces and like it performed well or didn’t perform well. So can you tell us a little bit more about KPIs and how you’re measuring performance across these different activities? You know, we know the overall goal, right? Increasing like velocity, increasing consumption of eggs. So I’m sure there’s something there that’s more of a lagging indicator.

But as you’re in these campaigns, you know, what are some of the things that you’re looking for to measure success?

Ed Hoffman: 28:47

You know, our, you know, the marketing program, marketing plans, programs, you know, these, these campaign metrics really come down to generally like awareness, engagement, and some of those more familiar, you know, KPIs where we can actually measure in real time to understand if these programs are performing and if not, make changes, optimize, you know, you know, as we go. However, they’re all feeding into kind of our overall, you know, business outcomes and our organization. We have. We have 12 different overall outcomes and we. Some of the ones marketing feeds directly into and probably leads.

When you talk about shifting perceptions and some. We may not be as directly, you know, touching per se, but the ones that we’re, that we are really feeding into is to increase demand. And we actually look at it from a per capita standpoint. And we’re we certainly contribute to that along with other work streams here. But when you talk about perceptions shifting, when you talk about, you know, people’s association with eggs is healthy, that really falls into marketing and comms space.

So, so what we do in order to better understand that if you think about, you know, measurement from sort of like a, I don’t know, pyramid or a chevron, depending on which way you want to think about that. You know, the progression here is you’re really looking at what are your tactical measures to make sure that you are achieving those. And then from there we start looking at lift studies, sales lift studies and perception lift studies. Again, working with our agency partner to understand how our programs directionally perform from driving sales. So it’s not an actual sales number per se, but it is a it’s a directional sense that we are moving the needle on from a sales standpoint and from a perception standpoint, because our ultimate business impact then is, did we move people’s perceptions?

Do we think that people are believe eggs to be more healthy, you know, or greater preference. And those will ultimately sustain increased demand? So it is a layered approach. But tactically, we really look at, you know, the, you know, the engagement and awareness kinds of numbers. You know, when we’re, you know, we’re looking at our programs, we get into like retail partnerships, we actually might look at volume moved and we recently finished, we really finished a two month campaign working with Instacart, which was, you know, very much about moving volume because that’s kind of the world we’re living in right now is because of our oversupply.

And we did make an impact moving volume, you know, units as well as dollar sales. But what I found most compelling for us from a marketing standpoint was 20% of the of the volume and sales that moved came from shoppers that were new to the category on Instacart. And that’s pretty compelling when you talk about impact. Now new is defined not just as I’m totally new and I’ve never bought eggs from Instacart or I haven’t bought in at least six months. So those are, you know, those are compelling, you know, from an impact standpoint.

But that’s really what we’re trying to do is, you know, again, we’re trying to grow sustained demand, you know, for, you know, for eggs. And ultimately you point, you look at perceptions, what can I control? You know? You know, to educate, change behavior, you know, improve perceptions of eggs.

Food Brands Winning With Protein and Convenience

CJ Bruce: 32:18

Yeah. That’s great. I appreciate you going to the the detail on that. So I want to shift gears a few a few other questions to dig in. So one, just taking a wider view on some favorite food brands.

So what are some of the favorite food and beverage brands you’ve got that you think you know, deserve some more attention?

Ed Hoffman: 32:36

Well, you know, admittedly, I have to say like, I kind of, as I was telling you before we got started here, this is like the one question I really probably had to give the most thought to because I don’t think about it as often. But, you know, for me right now, and this is not a big insight because I think this is a lot of what people are looking at are food brands that are really delivering on protein claims, because everything has protein in it. Now, for whatever reasons, you know, is it is it just is it just hopping on the bandwagon? Is it because, you know, you’re taking a GLP one? Is it, you You’re more into fitness.

So I think that I find there’s a lot of media coverage around brands that are doing exciting things with protein and delivering. So simplyFUEL is a protein ball. I’m actually a customer of that as well. So I’m not just following it, but it was created by Mitzi Dulan, who is a registered dietitian. And she, she’s worked with a lot of like major athletic organizations.

I want to say Kansas City, but and she developed these. It’s a great story. She developed these kind of protein, high protein snack balls that have like a sweet flavor to them for her athletes because they wanted something sweet. But you still have to, you know, keep that sort of, you know, health focused to some extent. And it’s just blown up, you know, you can buy them, you know, on Amazon, you know, major grocery stores.

I think she’s in Costco now. So I think that’s a really exciting story. You’re delivering on, on protein, you’re delivering on flavor, you’re delivering on convenience. It’s a good price point. And I think it has been an incredibly great success story for her because it’s largely grassroots and there’s no big ad campaign.

There’s no big that, you know. So that’s exciting. I also think what’s really interesting now, again, in the protein space is what cottage cheese brands are doing. I mean, grandma’s old dusty cottage cheese with like the cling peaches and heavy syrup or whatever. And cottage cheese is everywhere now.

And certainly, you know, you see a lot of mashups with eggs and cottage cheese. But I think what these brands and Daisy, I believe it’s Daisy launched a new campaign earlier this year to really shake off that image of what cottage cheese, you know, perceptions that people may have to really make it relevant for today’s consumer. And how it won, just how versatile it is. You know, whether it is you just legit enjoy eating cottage cheese with fruit or what have you or how it serves a real important role in different recipes. and, you know, boost protein content in a way that is, you know, that, you know, really enhances different recipes.

So I don’t know, simplyFUEL and Daisy, Daisy cottage cheese. So those are my favorites right now. Again, we could talk in a month and I could have moved on, but that’s where I’m at.

CJ Bruce: 35:22

That’s great. Yeah. Well we’ll get a part two at some point and check back in on the.

Ed Hoffman: 35:27

Notice how I’m selling that into you right now. My my subliminal and to be invited back.

Using an AI Audience Assistant to Test Marketing Ideas

CJ Bruce: 35:34

Yeah. Yeah, I love it. So another, another question that I’ve been asking pretty much every guest is around AI. And so obviously AI is having an impact on, you know, basically the entire economy. So curious about, you know, from a, from a marketing perspective, the commodity board also ways, you know, consumers are interacting with AI tools and all of that.

So just broadly, broadly, how do you feel it’s changing the work that you do? And how are you approaching that with your day to day?

Ed Hoffman: 36:03

So, we’re we have two different initiatives right now that we had started got a good 18 months ago, 2024. So the first, the first thing that we did is I mentioned our explorer, our consumer target audience that we, you know, really made, you know, an investment in building. So we have a synthetic version of this target audience. You know, she is our marketing AI assistant or Maya as what we call her. And again, we did this in partnership with Ketchum.

And this was a great example of a test and learn. You know, we were one of the first clients they’ve worked with to do this. And it’s like, let’s build it and see what the possibilities are. And so we spent last year building and training her and getting to a point with a high level of confidence that what we were feeding into her, the prompts we were giving her, we were getting back, you know, responses that we felt good about, you know, and that we felt that we could really trust. So we use her a lot right now to test like, program ideas, to test creative.

We run by to answer questions about different ideas that we may want to, you know, we’re considering from a programming standpoint, identify potential influencers. And, and right now, I think we’re still getting used getting used to using her, you know, and I find myself asking my team often, like, did you check with Maya? Like run it by Maya and see. And, you know, some of the things that have come back have been like, really, you know, interesting the response and some are pretty brutal. I mean, like, no, I would never do that.

I would not resonate, you know, and so the personality kind of comes through. But, but it has been incredibly helpful. Going back to the Roblox example, our oh my gosh, I forgot the name of it. It’s the avatar that sort of like, you know, come play the Tower of Eggs game that’s actually in the game. And we were creating it.

We needed to create one last year. The first year we used, one of the spokespeople we were working with agreed to be represented in the game, but that was only for that first year. So we created this last year and we’re like, let’s run it by Maya. And Maya said, I love it, I love it, but put a tattoo on its arm. I think that would find it more appealing.

We’re like, you know, it was amazing. You know that. So then she has like a fried egg and a pan now on the avatar’s arm, which is great. So I mean, that’s kind of, you know, it feels a little gimmicky, but if it’s going to resonate more, make that avatar more appealing or more interesting or more believable. So there’s that.

I think there’s 100% potential that we could, that we would start using this to maybe develop social content, not just pressure test social content. So I think that there’s certainly room for that. I think that we are using it certainly from, you know, just kind of creative concepting even, you know, to help, you know, bring ideas to life, you know. Or what have you. So we’re using that quite a bit.

And this is just the beginning. My insights team, he and I are actually working on some things about, well, what are other ways to bring AI from a more enterprise level? Like our innovation team, for example, we should absolutely have proxies for what is the typical QSR coffee customer, you know, so we can start pressure testing innovation ideas or innovation concepts. So there is a lot more to come, I think, on that front for us to use it. The other one is the other one is GE or, you know, generative, you know, engine optimization and that and how, how important that is now becoming.

I mean, we kind of refer to AI as an audience. Like, what are we doing to make sure that we are, you know, on the topics or themes that we want to be or feel we should be the authority that we are surfacing, being recognized as the authority that the sentiment around it is It’s positive. So we conducted several audits last year on that. And now we sort of have that process in place. We’ve you know, we are putting in putting in all the best practices in terms of, you know, revamping content that’s on our website, all of our FAQs, anything that’s new that’s being written to just feed into.

These are the areas, these are the themes egg nutrition, hen housing systems, you know, animal welfare, those kinds of things where it’s important for us to be the authority. We want to make sure that we’re showing up. So how do we continue to feed the AI beast to make sure that that’s happening? Earned media is a great opportunity for that. And it’s really, I think, kind of reasserted its it’s not prominence, but I think it’s making it even more relevant that we are securing excellent earned media coverage because that’s one of the, you know, top sources that AI search is searching at Reddit.

We are waiting our way into Reddit this year because again, that is kind of inexplicably one of the top areas, you know, these community forums, but, you know, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna fight it. It’s going to be, it’s not if we’re going to get in the game. It’s like, well, how do we get in the game in a way that is, you know, meaningful for that community and not just jumping in, you know, so that those are two big areas that why how we are, you know, leveraging AI. And I think it’s only going to, you know, really continue. There’s a lot of upside of how things could be, you know, used, you know, not just well, I guess from a marketing standpoint, but even from, you know, how my team sort of, you know, shows up, you know, or uses AI, I think there’s a great opportunity to help us better understand our target audience beyond this sort of monolith that we have right now.

But, you know, our target is like 18 to 34. Well, people are 18 to 22 are a hell of a lot different than people who are 30 and 34. We have to be talking about them more relevantly, more personalized, not just in not just in our programming or our, but our channels, but our creative, our language, like how we’re actually speaking with them. So huge potential for that. And I think that’s, we’re starting to move in that direction just this year.

And I think AI will be, you know, super helpful for us with that to help kind of hone what that story is.

CJ Bruce: 42:20

Oh, those are such great examples. And I, yeah, I definitely, you’ve just solidified your, your round two interview because I want to, I want to dig, dig deeper into all of those AI pieces. Yeah. Okay. I know we’ve got to wrap up here.

So I have one last question before I get to that. I want to make sure I point people to your website. So incredible egg.org.org. And then is there anywhere else you’d recommend that people learn about you or the work that you’re doing.

Ed Hoffman: 42:46

The work that we’re doing? I know incredible.org. It’s great if you’re interested in learning more about our, the two different consumer campaigns are meanttobebroken.org. That’s all about, you know, thinking about eggs differently, you know, in food, what have you. And then we didn’t really touch on our nutrition, but we have a whole new the first ever egg nutrition campaign we launched last summer.

It’s at strongerbythedozen.org. And that’s about really elevating kind of strong body, strong minds, which are two very relevant topics right now when it comes to people’s just well-being. And eggs have the protein and eggs have the choline. And that helps, you know, feed the strong body, strong mind positioning we have. So those two and of course, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Pinterest, all incredible egg.org.org.

CJ Bruce: 43:39

So my last question I wanted to get into, we didn’t touch on this either. But you, you do. You’ve talked about how mentoring is really important to you and kind of having that, you know, being a mentor. And I’m curious if there are, you know, advice that you got or mentor that you had earlier in your career, throughout your career that you know, still guides how you operate today?

Ed Hoffman: 43:58

You know, it’s, it’s, it is a big part of kind of what I enjoy, you know, certainly from a team standpoint, but I’ve also have taught at California State University at Northridge and you know as well. So even just that from a student standpoint, I think that, you know, I still, I still, I would tell my students this, I still tell my teens this and I still firmly believe in this. My very first boss gave me this advice. And, and it’s, and it’s so resonant, which is no one is going to ever look out for your career more than you. It’s not your boss’s job.

Your boss’s job is there to coach and advocate for you. But you know, no one is going to look out for your career more than you. So speak up if you want to try something. If you want to do something, you know, raise your hand and volunteer to do that. And it’s something that has really, frankly, guided me my entire career.

It’s something that I still tell. Like I said, I still tell students when I’m teaching students or I lecture at different, you know, different universities. My nieces, you know, three of them, two of them are in college and two of them are out. And I remember telling them, you know, that. And it’s, you know, even myself at this point in my career, you know, we still think about that.

Like, if you don’t ask what’s the worst that’s going to happen? Somebody could say, no, but be your advocate. Be your advocate.

CJ Bruce: 45:23

That’s awesome. All right. We’ve been talking to Ed Hoffman, vice president of marketing and communications at American Egg Board. Be sure to check them out at incredibleegg.org. Ed, thank you so much for being on the show.

Ed Hoffman: 45:33

Yeah. You bet. CJ good to see you. Thanks.

Outro: 45:37

Thanks for listening to The Missing Ingredient podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

Cracking the Egg Marketing Code With Ed Hoffman