Cutting avocados can be so dangerous that avocado hand injuries send thousands of people to the ER every year.

Everybody knows that whether they are waiting for avocados to ripen or handling them delicately, avocados can be a pain to prepare. But no part of that process compares to the risk of getting that dreaded pit out. One wrong slip and you become one of 8,900 people sent to the ER every year with avocado-related injuries.

Considering that Super Bowl Sunday sees 105 million pounds of avocados consumed, the most of any day of the year, we anticipated an inevitable spike in the conversation. To resonate with our audience, it was imperative that the work stand apart by recognizing the need for a solution while the rest of the category predictably focused on communications catered to big game puns and football fan behavior.

The Super Bowl is America’s biggest day for guacamole. Unfortunately, it’s also the biggest day for avocado-cutting injuries. So we had an idea: reposition Wholly Guacamole’s prepackaged guac as Avocado Hand Insurance (that’s right - insurance for hands from avocado related hand injuries)

To promote our policy, we got help from the people who are most protective of their hands: hand models. While entertaining viewers with the lengths hand models go to keep their hands flawless, the film introduced our Avocado Hand Insurance contest, where viewers were invited to model their best dip for a chance to protect their hands like hand models do - with our ‘Avocado Hand insurance policy’.

We placed our bets on older Millennial parents.

These individuals live a life of balance and believe in the ability to enjoy life’s wholesome goodness while giving themselves permission to indulge from time to time. For the 68.9M of them, time is of the essence, so they value convenient access to these indulgences. They are the type of people who would be opting for a healthy but indulgent scoop of guacamole over the communal seven-layer bean dip.

But guacamole was on everyone’s mind.

100M Americans watch the Super Bowl and ~55M watch specifically at viewing parties where 40% say their favorite food to gather around is a bowl of chips and dip. This provided an opportunity to reach a broader audience of game-day guacamole eaters, and resonate when everyone had guacamole on their minds.

During the Super Bowl, avocado-cutting injuries are more frequent than any other time in the year. So in the weeks leading up to the big game, we repositioned our risk-free, pre-made guacamole as Avocado Hand Insurance.

To engage with consumers, we filmed real hand models in an online video that explained the lengths hand models go to protect their hands—including our Avocado Hand Insurance—and then gave the public the chance to protect their hand with a year long policy by entering our guacamole dipping contest.

Then we enlisted influencers to amplify our contest and promote our new ‘policy’ at a more granular level, showing their followers how they could win Avocado Hand Insurance by modeling their dip on Instagram.

The overall winner not only got their hand protected, but also and became a hand model in their own right - as the hand of Wholly Guacamole in future advertising.

By tapping into a cultural conversation no other player in the category had recognized, WHOLLY Guacamole was able to carve out a unique space for the product to resonate during the year’s biggest tentpole moment for avocado sales.

The results of the campaign were:

- Increased brand awareness of WHOLLY® Guacamole by +17% in ad value over a year ago in the same period and +93% in editorial mentions.

- Increased consideration of WHOLLY® Guacamole by stealing 39% of search volume from Avocados from Mexico.

- Drove purchase of WHOLLY® Guacamole by +6% sales compared to the same period the year prior.

- +710M Impressions