The Seafood Nutrition Partnership (SNP) is renewing and expanding its successful “Fall in Love with Seafood” campaign to reach more consumers across the U.S. in 2025.
SNP launched the campaign in October 2023 as a way to increase seafood consumption and later partnered with U.S. grocery retailer H-E-B to roll out the campaign inside its stores. Over the course of the year, the nonprofit ramped up the campaign and partnered with other retailers including Publix and Harris Teeter.
“It’s capturing the attention of consumers on social media – where they’re spending a lot of their time – and it’s very targeted toward the occasional seafood consumer, where we’re reminding them to add one more meal of seafood a week,” Cornish said. “When you compare no marketing to a very successful campaign, I think that’s why we’re seeing a great return on investment.”
Cornish said companies that used the campaign saw at least USD 4.07 (EUR 3.87) in incremental seafood sales increases for every USD 1.00 (EUR 0.95) invested in the marketing – which proves that their advertising strategy has been working.
SNP Vice President of Marketing and Communications Sarah Crowley told SeafoodSource the campaign managed over 60 million impressions and had a wider reach demographically than SNP was originally expecting.
“We were targeting ages in the 25- to 54-, even a 35- to 54-year-old range. When we look at the demographic profile of occasional seafood consumers, we were like, ‘This is where we should target,’” Crowley said. “But, when we looked at all of the engagements, across a couple hundred thousand engagements on social media, about one-third of them came from 18- to 34-year-olds.”
Crowley credited the wider reach than expected to the tone of the campaign – created with the help of Neptune media – which featured slogans like “You never forget your first crush” paired with imagery of cracking open crab legs.
“This campaign is a little sassy. It breaks through, and I think it’s engaging with that younger demo. So, we’re hitting our core customer, but we’re also hopefully hitting the younger demo,” Crowley said.
In addition to social media, SNP focused on billboards and bus shelter advertisements targeting areas around Publix stores that had the company’s highest volume of seafood sales.
“Any time we can, we’re going to zero in on where those seafood customers are,” Crowley said.
Cornish said the marketing has helped reach the right consumer at the right time, and the successful rate of return on investment proves it is working.
Now that the first campaign has been successful, SNP is rolling out a new one that will be even bigger.
“We are expanding the campaign in 2025. H-E-B has renewed and actually has a campaign right now active all of January in Texas,” Cornish said. "H-E-B has added more to the campaign and is including their dietician team, which is part of their health and wellness team.”
The new campaign is working to find customers at different touch points it didn’t leverage last year, Crowley said. That includes three-day cooking demos across 300 of H-E-B’s stores to highlight seafood.
Part of the reason SNP can expand is the greater lead time it has on developing new marketing, Cornish said.
“You need more lead time for signage, television, and cooking demos,” she said.
Cornish added that in addition to H-E-B coming back, SNP is in talks with other major national retail chains – though it’s too early to name them as the deals aren’t finalized yet.
One thing that SNP can announce is a new partnership with celebrity Andrew Zimmern, a chef and restauranteur and the star of “Bizarre Foods.”
“He is helping us on a national level with this campaign, through this platform, to help people eat more seafood for better health,” Cornish said.
Crowley said Zimmern will be leveraging his over 3 million social media followers to help promote the new campaign.
Cornish said that the campaign has so far been beneficial to the seafood industry and has been gradually ramping up toward becoming a nationwide presence.
“The ultimate goal is to one day have a national seafood promotion campaign, and we’re building toward that retailer by retailer,” she said.
With the success of the first campaign and the expansion of the next, Cornish is confident SNP will get to that level.
“I think we needed this space for people to see how it works, and they’re excited to learn more,” she said.
