Armed with the insight that in love, as it is in bacon, it’s important to be selective when looking for “the one,” we launched the Bacon for Bacon Lovers campaign to help like-minded bacon lovers find their “one true bacon soulmate” through a dating application called Sizzl.

The app first asks bacon lovers about their bacon preferences, and then matches them with compatible bacon lovers nearby.

Using our Sizzl Meter, bacon lovers can then indicate how hot they are for a match to let the sizzl’n begin.

Once matched with their bacon soulmate, users could message one another and go on dates. We would even surprise a few lucky bacon lover couples with Wienermobile-chauffeured bacon dates.

We first seeded the app with an early-access email blast to current Oscar Mayer bacon customers and partnered with celebrity Lamorne Morris from the sitcom New Girl to be one of the first people on the app looking to find love.

The campaign launched with a quirky promotional video parodying the woes of finding love on dating apps today and was supported with paid digital programmatic display, pre-roll, iOS-targeted app download ads, search, and social content across Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr that all drove to Oscar Mayer’s website FindBaconLove.com.

To seal the deal at the shelf, we also created a custom on-pack sticker to tout that only Oscar Mayer bacon’s cured for 12 hours and smoked in a smoke-house for another 12.

With 54,000 app downloads, 2.8 million interactions, and receiving more than 890 million earned impressions, Sizzl transcended newsworthiness to become an outright cultural phenomenon. Sizzl was the topic of nearly 5,000 stories in the press, including feature coverage on national television programs like The Today Show, MSNBC, and Late Night with Seth Meyers, and outlets like USA Today, TIME, GQ, TechCrunch, and Mashable.

People were finally showing love not just for bacon, but for Oscar Mayer bacon; a love that grew Oscar Mayer sales by 5.4% when bacon category sales were down 4.2%.

Rather than targeting everyone who loves bacon, we focused on the 16.2 million “bacon switchers,” in the U.S. They’re women, between the ages of 25 and 55, who run their lives from their iPhones and routinely buy one pound of bacon a week.

After conducting a series of ethnographies where we spoke and went shopping with bacon switchers, it became clear that while buying bacon may be functional their relationship with bacon was personal. They listed off bacon preferences like they would a checklist for a potential love match – crispy or thick-cut, hickory-smoked or naturally smoked, chewy or burnt to a crisp?

Therefore, our strategy was to link the process of finding the right bacon to that of finding love. There are a lot of options out there, especially in today’s dating app world. But it’s important to be selective.

It’s a universal truth: people LOVE bacon. Digital insights found that bacon even had more searches and social buzz than Kanye West.

Bacon is having a major moment that extends beyond the breakfast table, showing up everywhere from basic sandwiches to five-star molecular gastronomy, and even in cocktails and desserts. People’s love for bacon is passionate – but fickle. When it came to bacon brand loyalty, people weren’t committing, opting to take home whatever brand of bacon caught their eye. We needed to help them find “the one”.