We took out a single billboard and offered to trade one Cheestring, like a kid in a lunchroom, to anyone who replied by phone with an attractive offer. We included a live phone number which people could call to talk to the man looking to trade his Cheestring - someone consumers thought was real, but was a paid comedian. The result was over a thousand individual calls from real consumers who had a one-on-one interaction with the brand from one billboard, but PR that extended the idea from Canada to the US.

For many years, Black Diamond Cheestrings has always held a strong position in the market. But with aggressive competitive pricing strategies, innovation in snacks, and pandemic lock downs, the brand was losing share. To elevate our product above commodity status and combat market effects, we needed to inject some excitement into the brand and have Canadians re-connect directly with their beloved cheese snack.

The new platform, “Keep it Cheesy,” was built around the idea that Cheestrings have an inherent child-like quality to them. So, what better childhood memory than re-creating the age-old tradition of trading lunchtime snacks to tap into to remind adults to have fun.

For 30 years, Black Diamond Cheestrings has advertised to children. But research shows that nearly half of their consumers didn’t have children in their household. Instead, they were Millennials who grew up on the fun snack in the 90’s. This was an opportunity to capture a large audience that had been passed over for younger generations. But how?

Studies show that by 45 years of age, 40% adults say that the very “concept of fun” had ended completely for them (Study Finds, 2019). Life had become so serious; they no longer gave themselves permission to be released from the pressures of being a grown up—to transcend back into their childhood and just have fun. So, we set out to re-write the agreement on play for Canadians. That Black Diamond Cheestrings is the invitation we are all looking for to bring out our inner kid.

The new platform launched August 2, 2022, with a giant, un-ignorable billboard at Yonge and Dundas Square in Toronto (running for three days), tied to a familiar theme for many Millennial professionals—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 any suspicion that a brand was behind it. If Canadians were able to sniff out that the publisher was Black Diamond, we ran the risk of people not playing along.

We included a phone number and hired an actor to play the role of 48-year-old professional trader Angel Domingo to field calls directly from the public looking to trade their most prized possessions for the cheese snack.

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.