When Kellanova, the company formerly known as Kellogg, decided to dive into US sports sponsorships, the starting point was obvious.
College sports, and football especially, have uniquely passionate fan bases, and football offers the broad reach that many sports marketers covet, making college ball a strong starting point for brands like Pop-Tarts and Cheez-It. Beyond that, with the rivalries and riffing that go down among college football fans, the space “lends itself really nicely” to a bit of absurdity, Kellanova CMO Julie Bowerman said, which the company has taken advantage of in its activations, including mascot sacrifices at the Pop-Tarts Bowl the past two years and a two-minute wedding at the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl held at the end of last year.
Kellanova brands like Pringles have also made appearances during the Super Bowl, and in the nearly seven years since Kellanova started bringing its brands into football, the company has evolved its approach to sports sponsorship, Bowerman said. With fanfare around basketball as high as it’s ever been, especially on the women’s side, the food manufacturing giant is making a move into hoops, she said.
“We’re making it one of our big bets for the brand next year,” Bowerman told Marketing Brew. “We’re looking at it as our next college football in terms of brand passion.”
Orange you glad
Cheez-It paved the way for Kellanova in college football, with the Cheez-It Bowl in December 2018 representing Kellanova’s first sports sponsorship, and it’s set to do the same for basketball.
Last year, Cheez-It inked a deal to become the first official snack of the Indiana Fever at the start of the 2024 WNBA season, and the brand also did a handful of NIL deals with college basketball players in 2023, according to NIL platform Opendorse.
This year, 15% of the “brand-building investment” for Cheez-It this year will be allocated toward basketball, Bowerman said. The decision for Cheez-It to push into basketball followed the same logic as football, she said; the sport has a big, passionate fan base. “We’re looking for that combination of scale, passion, and occasion, she told us.
If it ain’t broke, don’t sacrifice it
In college football, Cheez-It walked so Pop-Tarts could fly…or should we say, die. For the past two years, Pop-Tarts has sacrificed one of its flavor mascots—first Strawberry, then Frosted Cinnamon Roll—to satiate the appetites of the team that wins the Pop-Tarts Bowl.
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It seems the efforts have also sparked the appetites of viewers: In the eight weeks following the December 2023 bowl game, Pop-Tarts sold 21 million more pastries than it did in the eight weeks ahead of the game, according to Kellanova. The campaign also “broke all of our social records in terms of impressions, reach, reshares, everything that we had in our company’s history,” Bowerman said.
Beyond that, the 2023 mascot stunt won the Cannes Lions Brand Experience and Activation Grand Prix, marking a first for Kellanova.
Since 2018, Kellanova has doubled its investment in sports marketing, according to the company, and while Bowerman declined to share more specific figures, she said the increase has come with a change of mindset. Originally, she said, her team looked at sports as largely an ad channel, but they now view the space as “much more 360.”
That has led to activations like the mascot sacrifices, which represent a more significant effort in experiential, and a broader embrace of social media and meme culture as part of Kellanova’s sports campaigns, which is fast becoming standard practice for sports marketers around some of the biggest events in sports.
With that said, traditional TV ads are still part of the playbook. This year represented Pringles’s eighth in a row as a Super Bowl advertiser, and Bowerman said there’s been talk of giving Cheez-It the Super Bowl treatment. (For now, “we’re killing it in college football,” she said, and the team decided to stick with what works.) After this year’s Super Bowl ad, Pringles saw a 2x increase in game-day Google searches compared to last year’s game day, according to Kellanova, and the campaign was also the company’s top performing to date in terms of earned impressions.
“The Super Bowl is an event that can create fame on the brand,” Bowerman said “It’s a place where you can elevate your brand [to] iconic status in the eyes of consumers in a way that not a lot of other sporting events can do…The Super Bowl uniquely defines a brand as an icon.”
And so does publicly massacring your mascot every year.