Burgers, tacos, soup, salads — you can add California Avocados to just about anything. We put this theory to the test by adding our avocados to all the big game food advertisers. We partnered with a local chef to develop recipes that combined our creamy avocados with the products we knew would be advertised during the game. During the game, every time a commercial ran, we tweeted the recipe videos directly to the advertiser, piggybacking on their social media initiatives in the process. Each video featured a clever title playing off the brand’s marketing, like “Avocado the Rainbow” for Skittles and “This recipe’s for you” for Budweiser. Forbes magazine called it “the future of advertising,” but we would have been happy with “delicious.”

With only a small teaser in the days prior, the majority of the campaign ran during the Super Bowl. As each Super Bowl food spot aired, we were ready to go with an organic tweet and a targeted promotion. In each tweet, we tagged the food brand to elicit retweets and conversation, especially from the brand itself. Because the priority was inserting California Avocados into the Super Bowl conversation on Twitter, our campaign was only live for one day, and paid promotion ended at midnight. Instead of paying $4 million for a Super Bowl spot, we spent $7,000 total in paid media, while still generating a ton of buzz, PR and positive sentiment among consumers and the trade.

Using Twitter as our only medium, our Big Game Adds got fans, the press and even Super Bowl advertisers themselves to interact with what we were cooking up. The brand saw an 876 percent increase in impressions, with a potential reach of more than 2.7 million people — more than 200 times our organic Twitter audience. To top it off, the campaign generated a 535 percent increase in brand mentions on Twitter, making this Super Bowl one of California Avocados’ biggest days on social ever. Forbes magazine called it “brilliant” and “the future of advertising,” but we would have been happy with “delicious.”