Cheetos TPed Overdrive
Instead of selling the product’s taste or calorie count, for the past few years Cheetos has been working to associate their brand with fun pranks. One recent ad campaign tried to get people to toss a handful of the orange-colored snacks into a dryer containing a friend’s all-white wash.
This Halloween, the Pepsi-Cola owned brand is going for virtual fun by inviting users to target homes, office buildings, or famous landmarks for a good old fashioned TP-ing delivered by brand spokesperson Chester Cheetah. Go to their website https://www.project-tp.com and enter an address to target. Cheetos has teamed up with Google Earth and Google Streetview to provide the images used on the site. Once you confirm the target, an animation featuring Chester in a helicopter “flies” to the destination and drops a load of toilet paper onto the target. A few seconds later, you’ll see a StreetView image of the target draped with toilet paper. (The photo in this post is the Overdrive office suitably draped in TP.) And they haven’t forgotten the social sharing element for this campaign – you can post a link to the photo to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or email it to friends.
So – this all seems like fun but is it actually working? Sales figures seem to indicate the Cheetos brand is doing something right. This single brand accounts for a whopping 68% of all cheese snack sales. And, during the past year, Cheetos sales increased by 5.2% while the increase for their category segment was only 1.1%.
