No two Cheetos® snacks are alike. They’re made in a way that results

in each one being completely unique. And every so often, they look

like something familiar. Like a seahorse. Or a cat. Or Abe Lincoln.

So we turned 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. It was the world’s first collection

of the most interesting Cheetos shapes in existence. Then we

challenged Americans to curate the exhibit by submitting the most

amazing Cheetos shapes they could find, sparking a nationwide hunt

for the uncanny works of art in every bag.

We launched with a series of online films featuring actual Cheetos®

shapes that had been found that looked like Abe Lincoln, the Statue

of Liberty, the Loch Ness Monster and more.

These films 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.

To submit, you simply uploaded a photo of your Cheetos shape to be

framed and exhibited in the online gallery. The most unique

submissions were featured in social posts, constantly generating new

content throughout the campaign. We then collected some of the

most popular Cheetos from fans to preserve them for the exhibit.

Then we took the museum on tour, culminating in a live exhibit in

New York City’s Grand Central Station, where the best Cheetos

pieces submitted were displayed for viewing.

The Cheetos Museum was the most engaging social media campaign

in the brand’s history.

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 millions 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.

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.

The activation produced unprecedented levels of interaction with

fans, creating a fan-curated exhibit of over 127,000 unique Cheetos

shapes, found across all 50 states. It’s even more amazing when you

consider that every submission required customers to buy a bag of

Cheetos to participate.

Our audience was Millennial parents with children who are 8 to 12

years old. Seventy percent of these adults wish they had more time to

play with their kids (source: Let’s Play survey, 2015). So we thought

there was an opportunity to help them play with their food.

The museum fit perfectly with the Cheetos® brand’s mischievous

personality. Much like how the artist Marcel Duchamp turned

everyday objects into works of art, we elevated a cheesy snack to a

masterpiece.

The museum was curated in real time online, ensuring that anyone in

the country could participate. The campaign appeared in places

where we knew our audience went for entertainment “snack breaks”:

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

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.