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How Checkers & Rally’s Made a Wild ’80s Idea the Safe Bet
The brand asked for blue-sky thinking and a 40th birthday. The answer was Yung Gravy, a Kenny Loggins flip and a lesson in selling the big swing
Most QSR briefs start with a limited-time offer and a deadline. This one started with a blank page.
Checkers & Rally’s asked NAPIER (formerly Partners + Napier) for blue-sky thinking — no new burger to launch, no combo to push. Then, almost as an aside, the client mentioned the brand was turning 40.
That footnote became “Fryway to the Flava Zone,” the Yung Gravy flip of 1986’s “Danger Zone” that drops drive-thru customers into a neon-soaked Flavaverse. Rob Kottkamp, Chief Creative Officer at NAPIER, and Scott Allen, Creative Director at NAPIER, explain how the Rochester, N.Y., agency turned a dream assignment into hard-working creative — and how they sold it.
Their short version: big and fun are welcome. Pointless is not.
“It’s fun, but it’s not frivolous,” says Allen.
Rob Kottkamp, Chief Creative Officer, NAPIER
Scott Allen, Creative Director, NAPIER
An opportunity, not a problem
Allen’s team usually works from the menu out. A new burger, a new combo, a reason to get people excited this week.
This brief arrived with no product attached. “They really asked us to do some blue sky thinking,” Allen says. “They wanted to see where we could take the brand if left to our own devices.”
So the team took inventory. Late-night hours, a menu with some gloriously strange items and fries people crave — most of it, Allen says, something “no one’s ever really heard.”
The anniversary gave all of it a home. “They weren’t asking us to solve a problem,” Allen says. “They were asking us to find an opportunity.”
1986 doesn’t do halfway
Kottkamp’s first reaction to a blue-sky brief is one every creative will recognize. “It’s that dream assignment that also kind of can feel like a trick,” he says. “You know, are you being set up?”
It wasn’t. Checkers & Rally’s has a long streak of category-breaking work, including a stretch when Aeon Flux animation sold its burgers. “That’s strange on a good day,” Kottkamp says.
The team presented a broad range of ideas rooted in what was big in 1986, and the client leaned into the one built on Kenny Loggins. The decade made the case for itself.
As Kottkamp puts it, “the ’80s is many things, but it’s not shy. It doesn’t go halfway with anything.”
Neither did the campaign.
The ’80s as a meme, not a memory
Plenty of the people making the work never watched Crockett and Tubbs in prime time. Strategically, that helped.
“Gen Z in particular, the ’80s isn’t a time frame; it’s kind of an idea,” Kottkamp says. “It’s a concept.” It lives in memes, remakes and the tropes they carry — the mall, 8-bit animation, Nintendo-style graphics.
The visual direction came from merging people who remember the decade with people who know it as an aesthetic. Allen and Executive Creative Director Paul Renner drove the idea, producer Nick Bourne built out the scenarios with the client, and Yung Gravy became the bridge from 1986 to the audience the brand wants now.
Fun, not frivolous
For Kottkamp, the lesson is commitment. Clients have no shortage of data and insights; what stands out is picking a direction with a partner and staying on it, bumps included.
“You just run down that road together,” he says.
Allen’s lesson is the discipline hiding inside the fun. “If you look at this frame by frame, it’s like everything’s doing a job,” he says. “Everything’s doing work.”
The branding is there. The product is there. “The earworm is there,” Allen adds. “Sorry, but it is.”
One shot at a time
That discipline comes with the territory. For the biggest burger chains, a spot that misses is a shrug, because “there’s 10 other things running concurrently,” Allen says.
“We have one thing at a time,” he says. “So it does put a lot more pressure on it.”
Competitors have also spent heavily to be physically closer to customers, and “fast food is right there in the name.” The job is reminding people what makes Checkers & Rally’s more flavorful and craveable — and staying top of mind “when the tum tums start rumbling.”
A text, not a sales pitch
Yung Gravy came through G7, NAPIER’s sister agency in the independent Project Worldwide network. Once his name surfaced, Allen says, “everyone was just like, ‘Yup, done.’”
Allen had lyrics written before the first conversation. From there, Kottkamp says, the artist was “incredibly collaborative” — a couple of quick calls and he ran with it.
Kottkamp spent years inside holding companies, where tapping the network could feel like “a shill and a sell.” Here, bringing in G7, George P. Johnson or experiential shop Motive starts with “hey, let me just send someone a really quick text.”
“It doesn’t feel like a network,” he says. “They’re just part of the team.”
Make the big swing the safe bet
On selling work like this, both land in the same place: purpose. Allen’s approach is to talk the client through the thinking until the idea that looks risky reads as the safest bet.
He knows what it’s like on the receiving end of a hard sell. “Just tell me the why,” Allen says. “Give me the why and then I can buy it.”
Kottkamp keeps it shorter. “If it’s solving the problem, it’s easy to buy,” he says. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter… Clients can smell that.”
Grounding every choice in strategy takes the subjectivity out of the room. “You may not agree with the visuals. You may not agree with the music… but I can tell you there’s a purpose for all of it,” Kottkamp says.
At that point, the conversation is no longer about risk. “It’s more like we’d be crazy not to do this,” he says.
Forty years in, that might be the brand’s real recipe. “Anyone can come up with an idea,” Kottkamp says. “That’s easy. But an idea that solves a problem, that’s the tough part.”
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Rob Kottkamp LinkedIn
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Contact: chelsea.curley@partnersandnapier.com | 585-454-1010
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