The Impact of the Pop-Tarts Bowls and How Brands Can Be Their Whole Self.

“He came out of a toaster, a giant toaster, minutes before kickoff,” said ESPN play-by-play commentator, Anish Shroff, “Well, here’s the sad part of the story: after the game, he will be devoured. He will die, and he will be his own last meal.”

This is an actual quote from the first-ever Pop-Tarts bowl…

For a few hours on the last Thursday of 2023, we as Americans were able to put our differences aside and find solace in the two things that make this country great; football and breakfast pastries. It was simply beautiful and served as a beacon of hope for the year ahead, but it also served as a reminder to brands that being your whole self can be rewarded if done right.

Over the years my network has become mostly made up of people building in the emerging brand space. When I first started WeStock, our value proposition was deeply rooted in the fact that shoppers were gravitating toward emerging brands. “$18B has shifted from larger to smaller brands in the past decade,” was a line I repeated ad nauseam when speaking to investors.

But as millennials continue to age, have kids, and amass buying power, the same legacy brands that were doomed by the rise of emerging brands are making a comeback. This comeback is fueled by nostalgia and tapping into the core memories that millennials have with certain products.

The Pop-Tarts Bowl set that nostalgia into overload for me and it did so in a much more successful way than any previous attempts, I mean just think back to the last Super Bowl. As I sat there watching the game, I kept thinking to myself how I had now become the target demographic.

Alicia Silverstone returned as her "Clueless" character while Ben Stiller graced our televisions as Derek Zoolander, and don’t forget the main characters from Scrubs telling us to switch to T-Mobile. It was crammed down our throats in between every Isiah Pacheco handoff.

Now, most of these were lazy attempts to tap into nostalgia, just because some highly paid consultant told them that would be the best direction, but the Pop-Tarts Bowl represented so much more. It blended nostalgia with the grandeur of a bowl game, and in doing so created a truly unique event, that turned millions of viewers into something much more than just potential consumers, it turned them into content creators for the brand.

The response to this content was hilarious and exactly what a legacy brand like Pop-Tarts could have hoped for when they decided to host the bowl game.

It’s not just millennials that are reverting to legacy brands. A recent study by consulting firm Kantar found 52% of 12- to 29-year-old consumers prefer classic brands. These are coveted Gen Z consumers who are desperately searching for brands that resonate with them and legacy brands are going to force-feed these consumers with nostalgia until they can’t take it anymore.

The Pop-Tarts Bowl wasn’t the only bowl game that highlighted some popular brands. The Duke’s Mayo Bowl and Cheez-It Bowl all provided some great moments and memes, but nothing as viral as the first-ever Pop-Tarts Bowl. The Pop-Tarts Bowl met at the intersections of authenticity, audacity, and brand loyalty. It was a brand marketing supernova that built up so much brand equity going into 2024, that I doubt the true ROI from this event can ever be measured.

When something successful happens, in any industry, someone with less creativity is going to try and replicate it. We are going to see large brands do some very cringe marketing over the next calendar year, and it’s all going to be justified by the success of this singular pop culture moment.

I mentioned authenticity, audacity, and brand loyalty as the pillars that I think helped turn this into such a viral moment, and I think if you messed up even just one of these pillars the event would not have been as impactful as it was.

Pop-Tarts is a fun brand and product. You couldn’t pull this off with Jimmy Dean, MorningStar Farms, or Cheerios. You needed the nostalgia of the brand to trigger all those great mornings you had growing up when mom or dad just didn’t have enough time in the morning to make you a complete breakfast, so instead you were rewarded for their late wake-up with a delicious, flaky, pastry treat masked as breakfast. Pop-Tarts owns that memory and that feeling of starting your morning off as a kid in a fun way. Most brands don’t have that.

Two, the event itself was authentic. You felt as a viewer that even though what you were watching was crazy, it was something a Pop-Tart would do if he was alive for one day and had a football game to host. That isn’t by accident, that’s countless hours of market research and truly understanding how your consumer interacts with and perceives your brand.

This feels like a good time to give major kudos to the team at Weber Shandwick for being the marketing firm behind this event. “Brands can’t simply reflect culture — they must contribute to it,” This Is the first line on their site, and it is a goosebump-inducing one, and you can see how authenticity is a major contributor to everything they do for brands.

Lastly, it was audacious, but as I mentioned above, it wasn’t audacious just to be audacious. It was meticulously thought through and each subsequent moment, although crazier than the last, built together this great story arc of our Pop-Tart hero.

The event, the response, and most of all, the details were a marketing masterclass. With that, I think the two biggest lessons I can outline in this newsletter for brands need to be assigned in two buckets based on the stage of the brand.

For legacy brands, I think the lesson is to push your teams to forget this even happened. Don’t try to replicate it, don’t hire consultants to come in, and don’t make your marketing team push outside their comfort zone. It will not reproduce the same results. Instead, figure out more about the association your consumers have with your product and the moments, memories, and feelings that are tied to that. What Pop-Tarts did when you strip away everything, is turned consumers into brand champions. You can do that in a multitude of different ways and scales, but if you try to repeat something without understanding how much of an outlier it is, you are destined to fail.

For emerging brands, I do think that too many brands play it safe early on. They don’t spend enough time truly understanding the brand and messaging they want to build and instead just replicate what they see from a slightly further ahead competitor. I feel that emerging brands should think outside the box and not just check the boxes when it comes to their marketing efforts. You still want to remain authentic though. If you’re not a personable founder who is open to content documenting over content creation, you’re most likely going to fail to try to replicate a playbook like Mid-Day Squares. If your brand is a better-for-you brand with a healthy vibe and packaging, trying to shock people like Liquid Death does, will probably fall flat.

No matter what bucket your brand is in, it all boils down to undoubtedly understanding your consumer and the perception that consumer has of your brand. Pop-Tarts’ understanding of these two factors enabled them to push the envelope and create the exclamation point for 2023, the findings you discover for your brand might be completely different.

So, for 2024, let’s all work to build brand loyalty, be authentic, and if it calls for it…be a little audacious.