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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Agency helps Wheat Thins with message

Snack hopes new approach attracts new consumers

The Columbian
Published:

CHICAGO — When The Escape Pod, a small Chicago ad agency, was charged with creating a new campaign for Wheat Thins, an outside-the-box idea came from the box itself.

Drop a few letters from the name, and Wheat Thins becomes “Eat This.” Drop 700-pound concrete letters from a billboard onto parked cars to reveal the embedded message, and it’s an eye-opening television commercial, and perhaps the start of something big for the ad agency and the venerable snack cracker.

“You stare at the box for five hours and you realize the name contains the phrase ‘Eat This,’ ” said Vinny Warren, 47, The Escape Pod’s creative director. “It kind of blew me away as an ad guy. The next thing you know, your beer has ‘Drink Me’ on it or something.”

The commercials, which began airing last week, feature man-on-the-street interviews, supposedly about snacking preferences. When the appropriate letters have fallen and the parking lot carnage is complete, the startled subjects are asked to read what remains, uttering the memorable tag line.

Warren said the idea was born out of “sheer desperation” after receiving the creative assignment from snack-food giant Mondelez International, based in suburban Chicago, in November. The epiphany inspired an over-the-top execution commensurate with the magnitude of the “Eat This” revelation.

“In terms of concepts, it’s just amazing that it exists, so that’s what led us to do the executions of revealing that in a very, very spectacular manner,” Warren said.

Conspiracy theorists may see a Nicolas Cage movie in the hidden message, but “Eat This” is unlikely to have been buried in the brand’s name by design.

Introduced by Nabisco in 1947, Wheat Thins are a precisely named snack — thin, baked crackers made of wheat. They have, through a series of mergers and spinoffs, moved under the corporate umbrella of Kraft, and then Mondelez. But beyond new flavor varieties, the core product and the familiar packaging have changed little in nearly seven decades.

The hidden message was never intended as a cryptic sales pitch, Mondelez executives said.

“We were surprised and excited about the fun coincidence in the brand name, but that’s all it is, a coincidence,” said Linda Lee, senior director of crackers for Mondelez in North America.

Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said making “Eat This” the centerpiece of a new campaign is a clever marketing strategy that should resonate with consumers and translate into incremental sales. He said the revelation would likely have surfaced years ago, if the company knew it was there.

“I don’t think this was a subliminal thing the company deliberately put in there,” Calkins said. “If they had, they would have capitalized on it.”

Hope to pack a punch

Sales of Wheat Thins have been declining in the U.S. since 2011, falling 8 percent last year to $398.5 million, according to IRI, a Chicago-based market research firm.

Wheat Thins spent more than $24 million on advertising in 2013, with three-fourths going to TV, according to Kantar Media. Ad spending was down nearly 28 percent through nine months last year.

This is a return engagement for The Escape Pod, which created “Twittervention,” a 2010 TV-social media campaign responding to real tweets about Wheat Thins. In one ad, a giant pallet of Wheat Thins is delivered to a woman on her driveway after tweeting she was “outta wheat thins” and that her “life is officially over.”

For older snackers, Wheat Thins may still be more closely associated with its former spokeswoman, actress Sandy Duncan, who delicately munched the crackers in countless TV commercials during the 1970s and 1980s.

The new campaign certainly hopes to hit a little harder, with plans to air during coverage of the upcoming NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

“They’re perfect for that environment, the sports bar, everybody watching on a big screen,” Warren said. “These things are going to really pop and blow out your speakers when we start crushing the cars. That was the impact they were designed to have.”

Besides overseeing the creative effort, Warren played a more direct role in making the commercial, which was shot in the middle of downtown Los Angeles on a busy weekday.

“I pulled the trigger on the ‘N’ that crushed the valet shack,” Warren said. “I nailed it.”

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