Black Diamond Cheestrings has held a strong position in the market. But with aggressive competitive pricing strategies, snack innovation, and pandemic lock downs, the brand was losing share. We needed to re-connect with Canadians on a mass scale and inject excitement into the brand to elevate it above commodity status and combat market effects.

We launched the new platform, “Keep it Cheesy,” stemming from the idea that Cheestrings has an inherent child-like quality to them, with a giant, unignorable billboard at Yonge and Dundas Square in Toronto and tying it to a familiar childhood tradition for Millennials—the lunch trade.

The billboard was intentionally designed to look like a classified ad soliciting trade offers for a single Cheestring. The billboard was unbranded and kept low-fi to curb suspicion that a brand was behind it. We included a phone number and hired an actor to field the calls.

The campaign was a big hit, garnering 245 million earned media impressions, including 67 pieces of earned coverage off of one single billboard.

Major media outlets like Global News, CityNews, HuffPost, Narcity, and the New York Post who picked up the billboard story showed the product on air or in their publications, reminisced about eating them as kids, and discussed what they would trade—all unprompted.

When all was said and done, the billboard brought in more than 1,000 offers ranging from a Shaquille O’Neal rookie card to someone’s mom. But at the end of the day, we knew what we had. Nothing was good enough to trade and we didn’t accept any offers—not even the yacht we were offered.