Situation:

Everybody loves the serious flavor of Hidden Valley Ranch, but Gen Z no longer craves flavor alone; they crave the hype that comes with it. They’re willing to pay exorbitant prices for brand collab hoodies, wait hours for entry into exclusive brand collab events, and race against bots online for the chance to cop brand collab sneakers. To connect with the next generation of Hidden Valley Ranch consumers, we wanted in.

Brief:

Come up with an idea to launch the Only Serious About Flavor platform with an activation targeting Gen Z.

Objectives:

Make Hidden Valley Ranch one of the most talked about brands at the high school lunch table by becoming synonymous with Gen Z hype culture.

Hidden Valley Ranch is delicious, but hard to take seriously beyond its flavor. This thought formed the basis of the brand’s new platform of “Only Serious About Flavor.” The strategy? Subvert culture in unserious ways that put our serious flavor in the limelight.

Through social listening and cultural audits, we identified the world of hype culture as an excellent canvas for subversion. At the center of this subculture are brands collaborating with other brands to create drops that people feverishly attempt to purchase. It’s all taken far too seriously.

But we’re only serious about flavor, so instead of doing a stereotypical brand collaboration, we enlisted the only other brand in the world as serious about flavor as Hidden Valley Ranch — Hidden Valley Ranch. Using the world’s first self-collaboration, we subverted hype culture and proved to Gen Z that no other brand is as serious about flavor as Hidden Valley

Hidden Valley Ranch is delicious, but a hard product to take seriously beyond its flavor. This thought formed the basis of the brand’s new platform of “Only Serious About Flavor.” The strategy behind the campaign was to subvert culture in unserious ways that put our serious flavor in the limelight.

The brief was simple: launch the Only Serious About Flavor platform with an activation targeting Gen Z.

Through social listening and cultural audits, we honed-in on the world of hype culture as an excellent canvas for subversion. At the center of this subculture are brands collaborating with other brands to create exclusive drops that people feverishly attempt to get their hands on. All of the hype is taken far too seriously.

We created a hyped item of our own and dropped it at ComplexCon, driving our target audience to the event for a chance to purchase.

We developed a limited edition bottle comprising two Hidden Valley Ranch Bottles to create an ‘X’ that poked fun at the very symbol of hype culture — the ‘X’ found at the center of every other brand collab out there and released it at the mecca of hype culture and brand collabs, ComplexCon.

While other brands bought booths for their drops, we used a one-of-a-kind Snap lens to turn every booth into a Hidden Valley Ranch booth. When ComplexCon attendees used the lens, they were given a chance to score one of the exclusive Hidden Valley Ranch Double Ranch bottles.

To further play up our subversion of hype culture, we did a limited run of 222 Hidden Valley Ranch Double Ranch bottles and special edition kits. Why 222? Because ‘222’ sounded more double-y-er.

Our exclusive run of 222 Hidden Valley Ranch Double Ranch bottles sold out in under 30 minutes, garnering 1.9 Billion impressions, leading to a 8.6% sales increase of all bottled Hidden Valley Ranch.

By dropping the world’s first self-collaboration at ComplexCon, and taking over every booth at the event, we were able to subvert hype culture and connect with a younger audience while simultaneously proving the only thing Hidden Valley Ranch takes seriously is flavor.