The Cheestrings billboard was reliant on a bold media placement. Something that would make a classified ad seem crazy. So we found one of the biggest billboards in the busiest place in Canada: Toronto’s Dundas square. If we hadn’t secured the perfect media placement, the idea wouldn’t have been successful.

We generated 245 million impressions across Canada and the US and over a thousand direct phone calls from a single billboard media buy in Toronto.

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. We needed to reach and engage Canadians on a mass scale and inject excitement into the brand to elevate it above commodity status and combat market effects.

The new platform launched with a giant, unignorable billboard at Yonge and Dundas Square in Toronto, 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

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?

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.

The hero billboard went live August 2, 2022 (running for three days) at Yonge and Dundas Square in Toronto–a high-traffic environment guaranteed to turn heads.

Meanwhile, we extended the reach of the OOH activations in pedestrian-friendly areas by using monster wild postings. Large format wild postings mimicked the large impact of a traditional domination while maintaining the creative message’s grassroots look and feel.

TikTok and Snapchat were also used to supplement organic reach and ensure more Millennials were considering Cheestrings as their go-to 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.