Cannes Lions

Cheetos Museum

GOODBY SILVERSTEIN & PARTNERS, San Francisco / FRITO LAY / 2018

Presentation Image
Case Film

Overview

Entries

Credits

Overview

Description

This paper shows how the Cheetos Museum resulted in the biggest sales week that the brand has ever had and became the most engaging social media campaign in Cheetos history.

At the start of 2016, Cheetos® was a category leader but faced pressure and needed to find new ways to grow. Our challenge was to unlock an entirely new reason for people to buy the product again. That’s when we noticed that no two Cheetos® snacks are alike. And every so often, they look like something familiar. Like a seahorse. Or Abe Lincoln.

So we decided to turn our cheesy snack into a piece of art.

We created the Cheetos Museum, featuring real Cheetos found by real people that look like real things. Then we challenged Americans to find the most amazing Cheetos shapes they could find, sparking a nationwide hunt for the uncanny works of art in every bag.

The Cheetos Museum got Americans to look at their Cheetos snacks in a completely different way. Imagine a snack-food company encouraging customers to take a deeper look at their product, and even preserve it. Much like how the artist Marcel Duchamp turned everyday objects into art, we elevated a cheesy snack to a masterpiece.

All of the advertising featured actual Cheetos® shapes that had been found that looked like Abe Lincoln, the Statue of Liberty, the Loch Ness Monster and more. Everything drove consumers to visit CheetosMuseum.com, where they could explore the exhibit, vote on their favorites and submit their own shapes to win up to $60,000.

The museum was curated in real time online, and the most unique shapes were featured in our advertising, constantly generating new content throughout the campaign.

We then collected some of the most popular Cheetos from fans to showcase in actual galleries, culminating in a live exhibit in New York City’s Grand Central Station.

The 14-week campaign nearly doubled business goals and resulted in the strongest sales week in Cheetos history, and the brand’s share of the cheese-puff market grew by 1.5 points.

The campaign generated over 23 million video views and was a trending topic on Facebook for two consecutive days. It was featured on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the TODAY show, Good Morning America and in USA TODAY, garnering over 1 billion earned-media impressions.

The site received 1.47 million visits, 525% higher than the Cheetos average. And 127,717 unique Cheetos were submitted—over five times the anticipated goal.

And in an unprecedented turn of events, a Cheetos snack shaped like Harambe the gorilla sold for $99,000 on eBay, making our cheesy snack worth as much as an actual piece of art by Banksy.

Similar Campaigns

12 items

Chill Room

MULLENLOWE JOHANNESBURG, Johannesburg

Chill Room

2017, NESTLE

(opens in a new tab)