page_title: Jack in the Box
section_title: Advertising
hierarchical_section_title: Jack in the Box / Advertising
caption_attribution_description: English: Popular Jack antenna ball (Christmas version).
context_page_description: Jack in the Box is an American fast-food restaurant chain founded February 21, 1951, by Robert O. Peterson in San Diego, California, where it is headquartered. The chain has over 2,200 locations, primarily serving the West Coast of the United States. Restaurants are also found in selected large urban areas outside the West Coast, including Phoenix, Denver, Albuquerque, El Paso, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Baton Rouge, Nashville, Charlotte, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati as well as one in Guam. The company also formerly operated the Qdoba Mexican Grill chain until Apollo Global Management bought the chain in December 2017.
  Food items include a variety of chicken tenders and french fries along with hamburger and cheeseburger sandwiches and selections of internationally themed foods such as tacos and egg rolls.
context_section_description: The restaurant rebounded in popularity in 1994 after a highly successful marketing campaign that featured the fictitious Jack in the Box chairman Jack character (formerly voiced by the campaign's creator Dick Sittig), who has a ping pong ball-like head, a yellow clown cap, two blue eyes, a pointy black nose, and a linear red smile that changes with his emotions, and is dressed in a business suit.
  Jack was reintroduced specifically to signal the new direction the company was taking to refocus and regroup after the 1993 E. coli disaster, discussed below, which threatened the chain's very existence. In the original spot that debuted in Fall 1994, Jack ("through the miracle of plastic surgery", he says as he confidently strides into the office building) reclaims his rightful role as founder and CEO, and, apparently as revenge for being blown up in 1980, approaches the closed doors of the Jack in the Box boardroom (a fictionalized version, shown while the aforementioned minimalist theme music from the 1980s Jack in the Box commercials plays), activates a detonation device, and the boardroom explodes in a shower of smoke, wood, and paper. The spot ends with a close-up shot of a small white paper bag, presumably filled with Jack in the Box food, dropping forcefully onto a table; the bag is printed with the words "Jack's Back" in bold red print, then another bag drops down with the Jack in the Box logo from that period. Later ads feature the first bag showing the text of the food item or offer the commercial is promoting (both bags have featured text since 1998).
  A commercial was released in 1997 where Jack goes to the house of a man who has records of calling Jack in the Box "Junk in the Box". When the man shoves Jack yelling "Beat it clown!", Jack chases him outside, tackles him to the ground, and forces him to try Jack's food and confess his deed. The commercial ends with Jack saying "I'm sorry for the grass stains." "Really?" "No".
  The commercials in the "Jack's Back" campaign (which has won several advertising industry awards) tend to be lightly humorous and often involve Jack making business decisions about the restaurant chain's food products, or out in the field getting ideas for new menu items. While a series of ads claiming to ask when Burger King and McDonald's will change their ways about making their hamburgers featured a phone number, the caller used to be a recording of Jack himself (as of 2019, the number is a sex hotline). In addition, many commercials have advertised free car antenna balls with every meal, thus increasing brand awareness. Often different types of antenna balls were available during a holiday or major event or themed toward a sports team local to the restaurant. The antenna balls have since been discontinued due to the demise of the mast-type car antenna.
  During the height of the now-defunct XFL, one of the continuing ad series involved a fictitious professional American football team owned by Jack. The team, called the Carnivores, played against teams such as the Tofu Eaters and the Vegans.
  In 1997, a successful advertising campaign was launched using a fictional musical group called the Spicy Crispy Girls (a take off of the Spice Girls, a British pop music girl group - at the time one of the most popular groups in the world), in comedic national television commercials. The commercials were used to promote the new Jack in the Box Spicy Crispy Chicken Sandwich (now known as Jack's Spicy Chicken), with the girls dancing in "the Jack groove." The Spicy Crispy Girls concept was used as a model for another successful advertising campaign called the 'Meaty Cheesy Boys' to promote the Ultimate Cheeseburger in 1999-2001 (see below).
  At the 1998 Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Show, one of the Spicy Crispy Girls commercials won the top award for humor.
  The Meaty Cheesy Boys, a mock boy band to promote the Ultimate Cheeseburger, were created in 1999 during an ad campaign featuring an out-of-control advertising executive previously fired by Jack. The boy band would eventually perfor
caption: Popular Jack antenna ball (Christmas version)
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