The chain is Maaco, whose franchised stores specialize in painting cars and body-repair work. Maaco, owned by a company named Driven Brands, was long known for advertising that carried the theme “Uh-oh, better get Maaco,” meant to attract car owners to the chain’s sales, deals and other price promotions.

At first, the “Uh-oh” ads were straightforward. In later years, the company embraced the camp value of the campaign by featuring B-list celebrities like Charo.

A campaign that began last month signals a significant change for Maaco. The campaign, with a budget estimated at $25 million, is the first work from Maaco’s new agency, Pitch, based in Culver City, Calif.

Rather than taking the type of hard-sell approach that Maaco has used for decades, the new campaign wants to travel the high road: developing an image for the Maaco brand as the champion of second chances and fresh starts for “the not-new car.”

Ads in the campaign celebrate “potential” and “the idea that it’s better to see things not as they are, but for what they could be.”

“At Maaco, we don’t think new is necessarily better,” an announcer says in an anthem-like commercial that kicked off the campaign. “Sometimes the fact that it’s yours is all that matters.”

“So instead of giving up on the car you used to love,” the announcer says, “bring it to Maaco.”

The campaign still has roots in Maaco’s heritage in that there is again a device meant to help consumers remember the Maaco name. This time, it is not a rhyme like “Uh-oh, better get Maaco,” but rather a mnemonic device that plays off the brand: “It’s time for a Maacover.”

In addition to commercials, the campaign will include other, more contemporary media choices to underline that Maaco is changing. They include a redesigned Web site, mobile ads, digital ads and a major presence in social media like Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube.

The central role that Maaco and Pitch hope Twitter will play in the campaign is demonstrated by the fact that the ads render “Maacover” as “#Maacover,” including the hashtag symbol.

Twitter is also serving as a, er, um, vehicle for an innovative element of the campaign dubbed Twestimates. Potential customers are invited to send photographs of their cars or trucks to Maaco, using a special Twitter handle, @Maacover. They receive back estimates of what it may cost to restore the vehicles, along with links to local Maaco stores and coupons for 10 percent off repair services.

Maaco hired Pitch as its creative agency in February, less than eight months after the company awarded its account to a Philadelphia agency, Red Tettemer Partners. The shift came after the arrival of a new vice president and chief marketing officer at Maaco, Chris Furse, who came from Burger King, where he worked with — yes, you guessed it — Pitch.

“The lure for me in coming to Maaco was the ability to kind of reinvent an iconic, to a degree, American brand,” says Mr. Furse, who is based at the Driven Brands office in Charlotte, N.C.

“Uh-oh, better get Maaco” is “one of the great all-time brand advertising tag lines,” Mr. Furse says, and the public still recalls the “fun, kitschy advertising” that the company ran.

But all that was decades ago, he adds, and Maaco needed to be reinvented “for the modern era.”

“I wanted to bring Pitch on board and have a more creative and strategic partner at the table” during that process, Mr. Furse says, “someone I knew and trusted.”

Research found a good deal of awareness of the Maaco name, he adds, but in many instances that knowledge went only so far as to identify the company as “something in the car industry.”

It was “more like passing familiarity,” Mr. Furse says, which represented “a big challenge.”

All the sales and deals Maaco offered consumers gave the brand an image as “a value-based proposition, which is not a bad place” to be when the economy is still so bumpy, he adds, but the “promotion-driven” ads overshadowed other attributes.

The danger is that over time, “your equity is couched in the half-off special and you don’t mean much beyond that,” Mr. Furse says. “As a brand, you’ve got to stand for something, and that’s what we’ve been working on.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/maaco-puts-uh-oh-in-the-rearview-mirror.html?partner=rss&emc=rss