2020 Winner
2020 Winners
Frito Lay
Doritos Ketchup+
2020 marked the sixth straight year of Doritos Ketchup returning to shelves for a brief three-month window. With the product not available for most of the year, there’s an annual challenge of disruptively announcing its return, and in doing so, finding a new way to fuel the obsession of Doritos Ketchup fans. Attracting these loyal fans would be incredibly important to achieve the objective of increasing Doritos Ketchup sales by 10% from a successful 2019 run.
INSIGHTS AND STRATEGY
Doritos fandom has been built over time by engaging its audience instead of pushing a hard sell message. Continuing with this approach, a simple strategy was established: entertain Doritos Ketchup fans to get them buying bags.
In determining the best way to entertain Doritos' Gen Z target demo, the brand investigated the audience's media consumption, more specifically, the media they consume while they’re snacking. A glaring opportunity was discovered as displayed by their shift to watching video content on ad free video streaming platforms like Netflix or Crave, which according to Piper Jaffray, over 1/3 watch a streaming service daily.
Adding to this, the global pandemic resulted in a rise of online video watching as time spent at home also increased. For Doritos to produce a piece of video content and get it on a popular streaming platform would be a massive undertaking.
This insight created a bigger and bolder opportunity that aligned with Doritos Ketchup’s history of integrating itself in youth culture. It could transform from solely being a chip brand to also becoming a media company by creating its own streaming platform for the Doritos Ketchup obsessed, a brand-new way to enjoy the product they love.
EXECUTION
To announce the return of Doritos Ketchup, the brand launched Ketchup+, a mobile-first video streaming platform stocked with 21 snackable shows. Simply put, it's the first snack you can stream. Unlike other platforms that Ketchup+ closely resembled, it was cost free and just like the chips, temporarily available.
The snackable shows on Ketchup+ covered numerous genres that are popular among Gen Z including comedy, cooking, drama, mockumentary, music, mystery, and action. Right as production was set to start, the global pandemic arose resulting in overhauling the approach to production. In line with Doritos brand purpose of igniting bold self-expression, the brand turned to a group of creators and influencers across multiple countries and gave them creative freedom to produce their own Doritos Ketchup inspired shows in accordance with local COVID social distancing and shelter at home guidelines. Not only did they produce the shows, they also promoted them on their social channels to drive Ketchup+ viewership.
By cutting down the full-length shows, ten show trailers were created and promoted across digital channels alongside a Ketchup+ trailer. To help legitimize Ketchup+ as a streaming platform, these trailers mimicked other streamers messaging, sonic branding and graphics. A social media optimization plan was executed trafficking the most engaging trailers per genre to audience pools defined based on their genre preference. Additionally, media outreach efforts seeded Ketchup+ in publications relevant to the target audience for further reach.
RESULTS AND IMPACT
Within eight weeks of launching, Ketchup+ surpassed key campaign benchmarks by over 65% with 151,974 site visits while they streamed an unbelievable 39,428 minutes of what’s essentially a series of Doritos Ketchup ads.
The idea resonated with a mix of major publications and consumers on social media resulting in earning 8.8 million impressions. This obsession with Ketchup+ extended to Doritos Ketchup, setting the brand on track to achieve an 11% increase in sales from 2019 (10% objective) with nearly a month left in market and doing so without in-store display, a major sales driver in the consumer packaged goods category that was cancelled due to the pandemic.