Roto Rooter "The Marcus" QVC Parody

Here’s something you may not know. In the plumbing trade, Black Friday has another name: Brown Friday. Because it’s also the biggest day of the year for plumbing repair calls.

We’ll spare you the gory details but, suffice it to say, every year the day after Thanksgiving shows a nationwide spike in plumbing problems of all kinds – from kitchen sinks to bathrooms and beyond.

As the largest, oldest and best-known plumbing service brand in the country, Roto-Rooter puts a high priority on winning Brown Friday. It’s a critical moment for call volume (clearly). But it’s also a key opportunity to recruit new customers.

The challenge is breaking through with that audience – or any audience – during peak Black Friday marketing season. It’s the most cluttered time to try to get your message out there. It’s also the moment when audiences are most likely to be distracted or showing signs of ad-fatigue.

So, to make sure Roto-Rooter was top-of-mind when Brown Friday rolled around, we leaned into the moment and our brand platform to serve up something much more memorable (and shareable) than a traditional ad.

Our Brown Friday QVC Parody Video took all the clichés of the biggest shopping day of the year and gloriously applied them to shopping for a plumber instead. This approach was a perfect extension of our overall brand platform “Leave Plumbing to the Pros” – which is all about recognizing when it’s the right time, and right problem, to call in a true professional. And it also nailed our strategic goal on Roto-Rooter social to earn the right to add our voice to trending topics and moments just like Black Friday.

Likewise, the cluttered look and feel of a typical QVC broadcast – with all the captions and layered video – is a surprisingly perfect match for TikTok tropes. Which is part of why it performed so exceptionally well. With a 146% increase in impressions and a 113% increase in shares, it was the best performing post on Roto-Rooter social to date.