The long summer stretch has few holidays or happenings to keep Frank’s RedHot top-of-mind with our hot-sauce loving audience. But with the trillions of Brood X Cicadas about to emerge after 17 years underground, we were able to tap into a big culturally relevant moment in the United States and show the world that you really can put that sh*t on everything, even Cicadas. With a small budget of $15,000 we came up with the idea to create a digital and physical cookbook using real Frank’s RedHot recipes and featuring Cicadas as the base, in hopes of offering a delicious solution to the swarm.

Every 17 years there’s a major global event where plagues of cicadas emerge from underground, swarming the skies after nearly two decades hidden below the surface. And in May 2021, they came out all across the United States, immediately terrorizing the public as if some biblical nightmare had just been unleashed upon humanity. The whole country was buzzing about it. We were the brand that did something about it. Because Frank’s RedHot is America’s #1 hot sauce brand. And our tagline is literally, “I put that $#!t on everything.” So we told America to put that $#!t on ‘em. So they could eat ‘em. And get rid of these intolerable insects. By coming out with a serious Cicada Cookbook full of ridiculous recipes, right as the cicadas came out. Because when we say you can put that $#!t on everything, we mean everything.

You really can put that $#!t on everything, even the trillions of insects that only come out of the ground every 17 years. With the Cicada buzz taking over the news, including 800k mentions in the past year on social, we wanted to jump on this huge cultural moment to show the world all the ways that you can enjoy Cicadas, like any other ‘regular’ food is best enjoyed – with Frank’s RedHot. We know our target loves to try new things and be entertained, and our cookbook offered the perfect way for them to use their favorite condiment while also getting rid of the pesky insects taking over their backyards.

Our hot sauce loving millennial audience enjoys adding some heat and excitement to their lives, we produced a cookbook to satisfy their appetite by pairing these pesky insects with Frank’s RedHot. We crafted the recipes with real chefs, then hired an illustrator to design both a digital and physical version, completely free and downloadable on our website and via sign-up for the first 50 physical limited-run copies. In order to get our cookbook into as many hands as possible we primarily used social media (Instagram, Twitter and TikTok) to announce the offer, given that was where the Cicada chatter was organically occurring. To get the story to the masses, we pitched to a range of press covering cooking, publishing, culture, and trades. Since there was no media spend to support this work, we teased our books starting on May 27th, 2021 and the books became available the following week.

With a mere $15,000 production budget and zero dollars in media and public relations, Frank’s RedHot made a splash across the US with 183 million impressions. We saw pickup from 75 outlets ranging from general news, culture, cooking and advertising, including The New York Times, Ad Age, Paper Magazine, Mashed and Fox News broadcast. From a Frank’s RedHot brand perspective, we saw a large increase in time spent on the website, with consumers spending on average 4 minutes and 40 seconds interacting and thousands of digital downloads in the first weeks the cookbook was online.