• by Aaron Baar , May 13, 2013

A good night’s rest is about more than the eight hours one spends in bed. In a new campaign, high-end mattress maker Tempur-Pedic shows that the importance of sleep lies in how it affects you throughout the rest of the day.

“The entire bed category is -- pun intended -- pretty sleepy,” says Marcus Fischer,  president and chief strategy officer at Carmichael Lynch, the Minneapolis agency behind the campaign. “Most of the ads are focusing people on being asleep. What we’ve tried to do is focus on being awake.”

Via a new television commercial, the agency makes real the metaphor of a mom who becomes a bear when she doesn’t get enough sleep. In the commercial, two girls walk into their mothers’ room to find a literal brown bear in her bed. They go throughout the day with this creature, who knocks cereal off of shelves and is overprotective on the soccer field.

“It was so embarrassing we just wanted to say, ‘Go away. Shoo bear,’” says one girl. “But you can’t really tell bears what to do,” says the other. After one night sleeping on a Tempur-Pedic mattress, the bear has been replaced by the girls’ loving (and human) mother. The spot concludes with the line: “You are how you sleep.”

“There’s so many sayings about sleep where you identify whether you’ve had a good night’s sleep or a band night’s sleep,” Dave Damman, the agency’s chief creative officer, tells Marketing Daily. “Even with kids, we tell them they’re feeling grumpy and need to take a nap. The category talks about the act of sleeping, and what we talk about is the act of living.”

The television commercial (and its follow-ups, one of which involves a cloud), is part of a three-pronged approach designed to “Inspire, Inform and Convince” consumers about the value of a Tempur-Pedic mattress. While the television commercials are meant to inspire, online videos introduce the company’s “Sleep Innovation Labs,” where so-called sleep scientists show the value and importance of sleep in their lives. Those videos will also run on television.

“Both campaigns are meant to work in unison,” Damman says. “The inspire spots, those are meant to grab you emotionally. The next level becomes those inform spots. That’s trying to get at the innovation [behind the mattresses].”

The final prong, “Convince,” comes in the form of in-store materials where the consumers can try the mattress out for themselves. (The sleep lab commercials were also designed to be cut down and run at a dealer level, Damman says.)

Although the campaign comes during National Sleep Month and just before Memorial Day (which happens to be a big mattress sales period), the effort is intended to get people to consider just where the importance of sleep really lies.

“There’s also been a lot of publicized research about the importance of sleep,” Fischer says. “Americans measure everything, and there’s more effort toward understanding the benefits of sleep. [People] talk about the benefits of everything [they] do. The benefits of what ‘sleep’ is, that’s really where the focus needs to be.”