Cheez-It is made with 100% real cheese and in a crowded Salty Snack landscape, it's a key differentiator. To achieve growth goals, Cheez-It needed to address an underperforming segment –Millennial Snackers. While they think Cheez-It tastes good, it isn’t relevant. They see Cheez-It as a memory from their childhood and instead, are attracted to big-spending competitors with their celebrity endorsements.

Cheez-It's objective was to turn our differentiator, 100% real cheese, into something compelling enough to drive immediate desire in an entertainment-obsessed category:

• Get noticed by capturing national headlines

• Build excitement & engagement among Millennial Snackers

• Trigger immediate desire to buy Cheez-It at our DTC site where traffic was down

We uncovered a study where Swiss scientists found that aging cheese to hip-hop music enhances its flavor. With Millennials using music to enhance every mood and occasion we found our opportunity - to harness the power of audio.

Our strategy was to create a limited-time snack - Cheez-It Aged by Audio - and launch it like a music drop!

With a big idea but little budget, we looked for a partner as obsessed with music as Cheez-It was obsessed with cheese. Yes, we talked to the big guys, but they just laughed. Then we met with Pandora – a team as scrappy and as hungry as we were, with an extreme passion for music.

We creatively negotiated a $500K+ asset exchange with Pandora. We took Pandora's Sonic Strategist and four barrels of cheese to a facility in Brewster, Idaho where he created the audio cheese-aging set-up. We played Pandora’s curated hip-hop mixtape for our cheese 24 hours a day for 6 months until fully mature. Pandora promoted the program and Cheez-It featured Pandora on-pack including a QR code linked to Pandora’s mixtape and included Pandora in all promotion.

After 6 months of Pandora overseeing audio cheese aging, we introduced Cheez-It Aged by Audio x Pandora. We launched it like a music drop over 3 months, reallocating some funds from other efforts:

TEASE

We leaked provocative details and product samples two weeks before launch, sparking early buzz.

ANNOUNCE

We announced on Living Legendz, a new YouTube series we created with hip-hop icon and Pandora/SiriusXM star, Sway Calloway. Featuring stories from the originators of hip-hop helped us gain credibility. Social posts on brand/influencer handles and paid social promoted the collaboration, encouraging Millennial Snackers to join the pre-sale email list at CheezItHQ.com, capturing new 1P data.

RELEASE

Starting May 26th, we released the product on CheezItHQ.com and dropped the Pandora mixtape. Paid media-supported shoppable :10 social Facebook/Instagram posts, sharing our news while driving CheezItHQ.com traffic.

ENGAGE

CRM engaged 2.1M Kellogg’s rewards members, promoting Aged-by-Audio and a free Pandora trial offer.

Cheez-It Aged by Audio x Pandora delivered results beyond expectations.

We got noticed. We exceeded our earned media placement goal by 34% with high-quality placements -- capturing 668 earned media/social placements and more than 486,000,000 impressions. This included everything from on-air taste tests to top-tier coverage from outlets like Thrillist, Food & Wine, and Hot New Hip-Hop.

We engaged Millennial Snackers. Our social influencer content QUADRUPLED Kellogg’s average engagement benchmarks, achieving an unprecedented 9% engagement rate for social contracted posts (versus 2% benchmark). Also, the cultural conversation around Aged-by-Audio was overwhelmingly positive at 98% (up from 66% for CHEEZ-IT overall) and higher than levels achieved during the same time period by Cheetos (52%) and Doritos (64%).

And, we TRIPLED traffic to CheezItHQ.com for the three months of the activation, reversing the declining traffic rates that the site had been experiencing for over 7 months.