For the Christmas holiday period, Rice Krispies Treats needed to drive sales through advertising as they didn’t have promotion in store to capture incremental point-of-purchase. They needed a breakthrough idea that would help jolt base sales and further the brand’s purpose of fostering family connection.

Rice Krispies Treats are perfect for parents who want to share a token of love with their children via a sweet treat, but don’t have a lot of time. A dessert made from Rice Krispies crispy rice cereal mixed with marshmallows, it’s a simple sweet kids love and the packaged version is a huge time-saver for busy parents. Rice Krispies Treats also make for the perfect blank canvas, ready to decorate with the colors and ingredients associated with holiday themes.

Our brief was help parents create a bit of Christmas magic, and a lot of love and togetherness, with Rice Krispies Treats.

Parents want their kids to experience all the magic of Christmas, but the reality is they seldom have time or energy to make it happen. We identified rapidly rising demand among parents looking for activities of things to do, fairy tales, and desserts to make with their kids in Google search trends, rising from 88% to 340% year-over-year. We also learned “Rice Krispies Treats recipes” was the most queried Voice Search related to Kellogg’s.

Voice assistants make so much sense for dessert making. With voice commands, Google’s assistant guides people through preparing recipes with no need to clean off hands to touch the screen - especially helpful when those hands get super sticky from the marshmallows during treat making!

That’s what led us to create “Krispie Kitchen”, a simple and immersive, one-of-a-kind Christmas treat making experience for parents and kids with the Google Assistant.

We wanted to give parents what they were looking for: Fun activities and Christmas treat making ideas to make with kids, while helping them add magic to their holiday. We also wanted to give it to them in the place where and how they were searching - using voice, video and social media.

Krispie Kitchen combined magical Christmas tales and activities with kid-friendly Rice Krispies Treats decorating instructions. To start it, one said to their Google Assistant on their phone or Google Home, “Hey Google, talk to Krispie Kitchen,” and the first-of-its-kind, interactive adventure combining story and recipe began. People chose from three holiday-themed adventures, “Santa’s Hunt,” “Deck the Trees,” and “Reindeer Games,” each an entertaining and interactive audio story using narration, music and sound effects that guided families through the steps to turn Rice Krispies Treats into yummy santas, trees and reindeers.

To get the word out about Krispie Kitchen and incite engagement, we needed to explain exactly what it was. We enlisted the help of Parent influencers with large, dedicated followings in the kid-friendly recipe space to introduce it. Featuring the personalities behind My Cupcake Addiction, Trav & Cor, and Daily Bumps, we created long form demos of the recipe adventures for YouTube and they shared videos with their followers on social media, including Instagram, Instagram Stories and Facebook, which we helped to promote to parents. We also turned their demos into shorts for pre-roll that we ran across YouTube targeted to parents to drive additional interest and visitors to Krispie Kitchen.

The content showed parents how easy it was to interact with the assistant and how much fun kids had making the Rice Krispies Treats recipes, while engaging with the magical holiday themed story adventures.

Krispie Kitchen was the first-ever packaged food action on Google Assistant, giving parents and kids an easy way to bond over the magic of the holidays - no sticky marshmallow covered screens! Rice Krispies Treats saw a bit of magic too - a 5.3% increase in base sales for the holiday period.

We introduced Krispie Kitchen to 20 Million people across social media via our influencers, resulting in 1.6 Million+ views and 45K+ engagements. 2,500 people engaged with Krispie Kitchen on Google Assistant in just 2 weeks for an average time of 1:58, doubling Google’s benchmark of 1 minute. Within the interactive stories, we saw the highest rate of engagement right at the moment the recipe started, and Reindeer Games proved to be the most popular story of the three. Plus, Google reported 98% of users’ messages were handled, meaning the assistant understood their requests and intents.