Background & Context

● Jif had been working to win relevance with a new generation of peanut butter buyers and had developed the “That Jifing Good” campaign to drive taste superiority by showing people doing absurd things to enjoy Jif.

● But Jif’s largest branded competitor, Skippy, was targeting the same audience. Not only did it launch a new youth-focused campaign in June 2020, but it consistently outspent Jif for over a year, on average spending 78% more, and had 20x the budget in the quarter prior to Jif’s activation launch in August 2021.

Creative Challenge

● The creative challenge: Turn heads of a culturally savvy young target, while being outspent.

● We needed to do more than just show someone doing absurd things for Jif. We needed to actually make something absurd happen in consumers’ culture.

Solution

● We found a conversation that served as the insight and inspiration.

● A genre of rappers was described as sounding like they “have a mouthful of peanut butter” because their lyrics were hard to understand.

● This style of rap was hotly derided by traditional rappers. Rap was one of the most popular styles of music for our young target, so it could help the brand drive relevance.

● The solution? Have a traditional rapper drop a track in this new form of rap. Reveal that this surprising switch was due to their love of Jif.

Execution

The holistic program had three parts:

1) Create a new rap sound from an unexpected artist: Ludacris, a self-proclaimed PB lover and legendary 2000s rapper still popular across generations today, would release his first single in over six years to the delight of his fans. But there would be a catch: It wouldn’t sound like the old Ludacris, and instead it would have a modern trap beat and near-incomprehensible lyrics. Fans would (and did) go wild wondering why his sound changed so drastically.

2) Reveal Jif was behind Ludacris’ new sound: After a weekend of hip-hop fans debating over Luda’s new sound, Jif revealed through an authentic music video that Ludacris’s new flow was caused by his not being able to resist a delicious mouthful of Jif, even while recording in the studio, which inspired an entirely new Jif rap sound. The rug-pull moment coincided with our big launch, across TV, online video, OOH, social, search and, of course, audio on Spotify.

3) Invite fans to participate – with a mouth full of Jif: To seed this new sound, we went to where music is heard today, TikTok. But users don’t just listen to music on TikTok, they build on it. So, rather than push content, we wanted fans to create. Ludacris kicked off a TikTok challenge inviting all to duet.