Celebrities are no stranger to the Super Bowl ad stage. This year, Pringles is bringing some famous moustaches in pop culture to the forefront.
The stackable chip brand, helmed by its moustachioed mascot, Mr. P, is making its eighth appearance in the Big Game, and this time, he’ll be alongside celebrities well known for their facial hair: actor Nick Offerman, NBA star James Harden, and Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, plus some heartthrob energy brought by Adam Brody and Mr. Potato Head.
The ad, set to a parody of the ’60s Batman TV show theme song, marks the first time Pringles has leveraged a fuller celebrity cast at the Super Bowl, and it was important to be intentional about who they chose to include beyond just their famous facial hair, according to Sarah Reinecke, Kellanova’s US VP of marketing, salty snacking.
“We wanted to borrow celebrities that were famous for their ’staches,” Reinecke told Marketing Brew. “We also wanted some talent that just really brought a lot of different audiences together.”
Funny guys
Pringles worked with FCB on the ad’s creative, a process that Reinecke described as full of “chemistry.” While the brand prioritized getting celebrities with moustache authority, the agency brought “really unexpected breakout humor,” Reinecke said.
In the production process, the stars of the ad also shot behind-the-scenes spots designed specifically for social media. In one, Adam Brody kicks off a TikTok-native trend by “passing the phone” to someone with a moustache that “can expertly work a table saw”—in this case, Offerman. Offerman passes the phone to Harden, and on it goes.
It’s all part of what Reinecke calls Pringles’s “60 days of Super Bowl” approach, which expands the team’s efforts far beyond its single Super Bowl spot. The team also has plans to continue running the ad in different formats, including an extended version, through the first half of the year.
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“We have a lot of the work leading up to it, the teasers, the tease to the teasers, some great lo-fi social engagements behind the spot. We have a lot of press with the spot reveal itself, and then we have a lot of retail execution behind it,” Reinecke said. “That was another kind of key part of us is, How does Pringles…really make fame-making work, and really make commercial-making work?”
Building hype
When it first began teasing this year’s ad, Pringles leaned into a sense of mystery around the celebrities who would be featured in the spot. In an Instagram post, for example, the brand displayed four Pringles cans featuring Mr. P-style silhouettes of Brody, Offerman, Harden, and Reid, encouraging fans to guess who might star in the ad before the official reveal.
“As we planned our approach, we really looked at how we could create multiple pulses in coverage,” Reinecke said. “That was the value of doing things in a bit of a cadence.”
The team focused particularly on social channels to build engagement leading up to the ad’s debut in an effort to “reach audiences that would tune in on game day, but that could also tune in before,” Reinecke said. The focus came after the team did an exercise comparing its Super Bowl plans over the years and identified “pivots” where it had previously leveraged social media, she told us.
With all of its Super Bowl efforts this year, Reinecke said elevating brand assets like Mr. P and its signature can was key to making sure that while the ad leans on celebrity presence, it isn’t about star power alone.
“You can have a lot of brands seeking fame,” Reinecke said. “We are seeking fame. I think we’re doing it in a way that is really ownable and recognizable by us.”