Even for the seasoned copywriter, spelling is hard.

Jimmy Dean and Ogilvy Chicago are celebrating this week’s Scripps National Spelling Bee in a fun way—with billboards in the Washington, D.C., area that feature intentional misspellings. In a kind of scavenger hunt, the company is rewarding those who correctly identify the mistakes with the chance to win free breakfast and a donation to support child literacy. 

This is Jimmy Dean’s first partnership with the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The creative leads on the business at Ogilvy, Eduardo Cintron and Geoff Berg, said it felt like a good match from the start.

“Jimmy Dean sets your day off on the right foot,” the pair told Ad Age in an email. “The protein-packed breakfast brings out the best in you, and keeps you firing on all cylinders. So the partnership felt like a perfect opportunity to bring the brand's benefit and promise to life.”

“It challenges the audience in an insightful way, designed to bring out the best of them,” added Isaac Pagan-Munoz, the agency’s executive creative director. “Our brand is all about optimism, and our breakfasts give you the energy you need to be alert. So, the idea felt very true to brand, and authentic to the context it was placed in.”

Pagan-Munoz said the agency tried to be “playful but intentional in execution,” with the ads looking much like the brand’s mass-market ads, but with subtle—and not-so-subtle—misspellings in them.

Mindshare was the media agency on the campaign. Executions are running in and around the Spelling Bee campus (the event is taking place at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland) via multiple billboards, digital OOH placements and social assets. “We wanted to create a surround-sound in and around the location of the event, then scaling it via social so that anyone could participate,” said Cintron and Berg.

Success will be measured in brand awareness and brand affinity, by measuring tune-in to the Spelling Bee, and by the amount of donations made to the Howard Fund.

The 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee began with preliminary rounds Tuesday night, followed by quarterfinals and semifinals Wednesday and the finals on Thursday.