Campaign Trail is our evaluation of a few of the very best latest creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns within the archives here.
The days when college football bowl games had easy names just like the Rose Bowl and Orange Bowl are long gone; for years, brands have stepped up to sponsor the match-ups that fill the TV schedule throughout the holidays. Once the purview of major marketers in banking, telecom and insurance, bowl games have increasingly looked outside the box for sponsorships to fund and draw attention to the growing season.
More so than controversy or the eventual winner of the Jan. 8 championship game, it’s considered one of those latest sponsors that can likely be essentially the most memorable a part of this bowl season thanks to an attention grabbing game-day stunt by Pop-Tarts.
When the Kellanova brand announced plans for an edible mascot back in November, few could have guessed what the activation would entail or how it could captivate an audience of consumers who otherwise would not have been watching the competition between Kansas State and NC State on Dec. 28.
In a now-viral moment, the Pop-Tarts mascot emerged from an enormous toaster that had been wheeled onto the sphere. Holding an indication that said “Dreams really do come true” and dancing to Donna Summer’s disco classic “Hot Stuff,” the mascot then descended into the toaster and was “transformed” into an enormous toaster pastry that was devoured by the Kansas State team.
The Pop-Tart holding up an indication that claims “Dreams really do come true” because it is lowered right into a toaster to be cooked alive is the darkest thing I’ve ever seen https://t.co/ujJyD8i1Ml
— Derek Faraci (@WH_Woolhat) December 29, 2023
“For sixty years, Pop-Tarts has sacrificed every little thing for flavor and our mascot on the first-ever Pop-Tarts Bowl wasn’t going to be any different,” said Heidi Ray, senior director of brand name marketing for Pop-Tarts, in emailed comments. “Knowing mascots are the final word symbol of harmony, we wanted to go above and beyond to wow the group each at home and within the stadium, thus the first-ever edible mascot was born…after which eaten.”
For Pop-Tarts, the activation — in all its darkly weird or weirdly dark glory — grew out of the brand’s “Agents of Crazy Good” platform. Launched over the summer, the brand’s latest creative direction calls back to its “Crazy Good” ads from the 2000s, but with a twist: while previous ads featured anthropomorphized Pop-Tarts fleeing from hungry people, the brand new campaign features characters who crave being eaten.
“The Pop-Tarts Bowl mascot was an IRL manifestation of this campaign, running across the stadium, interacting with fans and referees and gleefully transforming right into a game-winning snack for the victors, identical to in our most up-to-date advertisements,” Ray explained.
“We wanted to ensure there was no confusion around how Frosted Strawberry felt about being dropped into the toaster and eaten by the winning team. Our mascot, like our iconic toaster pastries, was born to be enjoyed by fans. As the sign Frosted Strawberry held while being lowered into an enormous toaster said, this ultimate sacrifice is what its dreams were made of.”
Winning on the sphere of social media
Embracing an off-beat humorousness at its inaugural bowl game has been a boon for Pop-Tarts on social media. Over the last six months, around 30% of all Pop-Tart mentions on social media originated from the sport, per Talkwalker data shared with Marketing Dive. On game-day, the mascot “dominated conversations” across the bowl game.
“Sentiment is a difficult one as you get the emotions of the sport impacting the outcomes — plus there have been some dark jokes related to the mascot toasting,” according to a Talkwalker spokesperson. “But overall, the sport was about +20% net sentiment, and mentions across the mascot were +30.2% net sentiment.”
Pop-Tarts is taking the social engagement in stride, monitoring social conversation, amplifying its owned content across platforms and interacting with user-generated content on Instagram, X and TikTok.
“We are lucky to have such engaged fans who embraced our edible mascot and injected their very own quirky, creative humor into their social commentary and content. We can’t stop watching all of the memes, chatter, videos and stories taking on our feeds and look forward to seeing what else our ingenious fans give you,” Pop-Tarts’ Ray said.
The level of social engagement, especially compared to other bowl sponsorships, may very well be a lesson for other marketers looking to the faculty football space to engage with consumers.
Among all bowl games sponsors, Pop-Tarts had 4 times the quantity of engagement at any time when their brand was mentioned, versus every other bowl game, and has been essentially the most engaged bowl game wherever brands were included, per data from sports and entertainment intelligence platform SponsorUnited.
“Now there’s this roadmap of a brand that was able to go viral by leveraging this bowl game that no person perhaps cared that much about, aside from the 2 schools, and impulsively, there’s this huge opportunity — this can be a potential low-cost entry way for [brands] to really own something and create something truly viral in nature,” said Bob Lynch, founder and CEO of SponsorUnited.
“Pop-Tarts, as a brand, historically has more those who have had a Pop-Tart than those who know anything about NC State or Kansas State,” Lynch noted. “They bring a latest audience and brand value to the dynamic.”
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