Snack food is a hyper-competitive sector with vast choice, endless advertising, and evolving tastes. Gaining younger attention (18-34) is key to lifting sales and market share. Pringles wanted an idea to go beyond advertising to create engagement, organic social, and earned media. An idea extendable into product, packaging, and retail promotions.

The two year long hiatus of Adult Swim’s #1 show Rick and Morty left fans ravenous for new content. Rick and Morty’s return was going to be huge. Combining it with the year’s biggest US TV event would be huger. Leveraging the power of the Multiverse could be hugest.

This partnership answered the question nobody asked – how does anything win sustained attention throughout the Multiverse? The goal was simple – breach the walls of commercial sponsorship with a partnership beyond screens to build: brand love, massive impressions, social engagement, PR hits, and lift sales in a gigantic way.

For Pringles to correctly partner with an entertainment property like Rick and Morty, everything had to remain true to the show. For this reason, we leaned into the show’s innovative premise. Rick and Morty are known for traveling to the most terrifying universes. So, we trapped Rick and Morty in the worst universe imaginable for our cynical young target: Advertising. By remaining true to the show, these marketing efforts would go beyond advertising and become innovative, unskippable entertainment that fans would enjoy and share. And Rick and Morty weren’t just trapped in a TVC. Pringles would trap them in every media at their disposal. In this way, we’d breach the walls of regular advertising to create sustained engagement and become part of culture throughout the Multiverse. We would go beyond screens to entertain, build brand love, earn impressions, get social engagement, and lift sales in a gigantic way.

The primary target audience was Americans 18 - 35. This group is more skeptical of advertising than any generation – 84% don’t trust it. 46% pay for ad blockers. When it comes to getting this group’s attention, traditional advertising doesn’t usually work. But how do you advertise to people who dislike advertising? We needed to create a buzzworthy, earned-centric narrative that this group would engage with. We needed shareable content that would naturally become part of their culture. So, Pringles partnered with two characters that this generation know and love, Rick and Morty. We built our buzzworthy narrative around the show’s premise: Rick and Morty are known for traveling to terrifying universes. So, we trapped them in the worst universe imaginable for our target: Advertising. This storytelling idea would then play out in PR and across all of Pringles’ media channels for the duration of 2020.

Rick and Morty got trapped in every conceivable piece of Pringles media for the duration of 2020. This innovatively turned all of Pringles’ regular advertising into entertainment. In this partnership, RAM got trapped in a Pringles TVC, which ran throughout the year. Rick’s Alter ego, Pickle Rick, got trapped in a new flavor: Pickle Rick Pringles. The TVC also introduced fans to a new character, MortyBot, who got trapped on social, spamming the addiest night of the year: Super Bowl. The MortyBot also took over the show’s mobile game. And he appeared at Virtual Adult Swim Con and Adult Swim Festival. Besides all this, a host of entertaining social content was created; including a Snapchat Lens and gamified Instagram filter, as well as a series of social videos that were posted through the year.

Every part of this initiative broke records for Pringles. The campaign generated 1.2B media impressions, appearing in almost every major news, media and trend outlet. Pringles and Rick and Morty’s year-long social campaign attracted more than 122.6 Million Organic impressions and 27M Video Views. The campaign trended on Reddit week of launch. Pickle Rick Pringles was a #3 trending item on eBay. The Pocket Mortys mobile game integration gained 9.5M impressions and 1M Video Views. Pickle Rick Pringles sold out. Twice. And overall product sales lifts outperformed competitive networks from 4Q 2019 – 2Q 2020. With Pringles growing +13% in gross sales volume over 2020. Which was a record for the brand.