To cajole people into eating snacks laden with spicy gherkin flavor, the folks at Frito Lay need to get themselves out of a real pickle.
The quandary is this: Snacking giant Frito-Lay is reviving its Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Dill Pickle flavored edition and launching Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Dill Pickle Puffs. To do so, the PepsiCo unit wants to grab the attention of younger consumers on social and digital media, where interactive technology gives rise to scrolling, swiping and other short-attention span behaviors.
How can the company get quick-hit media mavens to stop in their tracks?
Frito-Lay tapped Megan Thee Stallion and Nickelback to collaborate on a new music video that mixes winking humor, special effects and a remake of the band’s 2001 hit “How You Remind Me,” with some new wrinkles developed by Megan Thee Stallion. The go-for-broke concept, which includes a high-tech heist, a high-speed truck chase and a massive explosion of Cheetos dust, shows the levels to which marketers must ascend to capture consumer attention in media venues that constantly offer new stimuli.
The idea, says Chris Bellinger, chief creative officer at PepsiCo Foods U.S., is to get younger consumers not only to pay attention, but to pass the video along to their friends. “What we’ve seen is I can buy a view, but I can’t buy a like and I can’t buy a comment. And I definitely can’t buy a share,” the executive says. “I want to get the text message from someone or someone to text someone else, and be like, ‘You’ve got to check this out. You’re not going to believe what Cheetos just did. You’re not going to believe Nickelback, and Megan Thee Stallion are singing about Cheetos Flaming Hot Dill Pickle. Watch this.’ Yeah. That’s worth gold to us.”
Spectacular one-off commercials can certainly generate viral buzz. In 2003, Pepsi stirred conversation by creating an eye-popping commercial for international markets that featured Beyonce, Britney Spears and Pink as Roman gladiators battling in the Coliseum to the sounds of Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Enrique Iglesias appeared as a cruel Emperor whose plans were thwarted by the musical warriors. Because the ad wasn’t shown via U.S. media buys, Americans grew curious about the rare gathering of artists.
Frito-Lay first introduced its spicy dill-pickle Cheetos as a limited-edition flavor in February of last year. But pickle, says Belinger, “is a polarizing flavor” that has intense fans and detractors in equal number. For those who liked the snack, “you have this spicy element, and you have the salty safety of the dill pickle.” Packages of the original offering sold out and were even being offered on eBay for $60, says Bellinger. Executives noticed continued chatter about the flavor on social media, and Megan Thee Stallion was such a big fan that she was spotted in public combining Flamin Hot’ Cheetos with actual pickles.
Getting Megan Thee Stallion and Nickelback to work together wasn’t as difficult as it might seem. The request and combination were so offbeat that both artists agreed to take part, quickly, and the band took over writing duties after Frito-Lay staffers first tried their own hand at a parody of their 2001 tune.
More outlandish elements were put in the mix. With the song in expert hands, Dave Meyer, the commercial’s director, asked to add other off-kilter elements, including a plotline about Nickelback and Megan stealing new Cheetos from a vault and loading them on to a giant truck that would also serve as their escape vehicle. “I got more and more permission to just keep letting the crazy out,” Meyers says.
Ultimately, says Bellinger, Frito-Lay created a minutes-long version of the video, as well as shorter cutdowns. The goal “is not necessarily to get you to buy the product right then and there, but to go online and search for the full song, because we want this to become an earworm,” he says.
Frito-Lay has in recent years upped the ante on video ads, working to create concepts that warrant extra attention. In 2019, for example thje company launched a holiday commercial touting al of its many snacks, included Ruffles and Tostitos. Anna Kendrick worked her way though a retooled version of “My Favorite Things,” with lyrics such as “eating Doritos on big comfy couches” and “Secret Santa with family and Cheetos.” In 2024, the company teamed up with Disney’s ABC in an audacious bid to snare attention: Frito-Lay bought one third of all of Friday’s national advertising inventory on ABC so the snacking giant could run — and run again — eight different commercials for Lay’s potato chips that showed actor Stephen Tobolowsky going through a scenario similar to that from the 1993 comedy “Groundhog Day”
Bellinger hopes to keep going big, with commercials. “The worst possible scenario is no one’s paying attention,” he says. “And no one remembers what you did.”
