Throughout the second half of the 20th century, bologna was the sandwich meat of choice for millions of Americans, and Oscar Mayer was the go-to brand. But the category has been in decline for decades. As food trends changed, bologna fell out of favor. It was seen as processed, dated, mystery meat. As a result bologna sales fell precipitously at around 1 % per year throughout the 1990s. By 2016, bologna made up just 9.4% of all processed lunch meat sales.

This was a big problem for Oscar Mayer’s business. The brand was synonymous with bologna itself. Oscar Mayer popularized the meat in childhood lunches with its iconic jingle “My Bologna Has A First Name.” Millennial kids grew up singing about its bologna in the 80s & 90s, but Oscar Mayer was stuck in the past. We needed a jolt of reappraisal for bologna as well as the brand.

To modernize the brand we looked to the past.

It started with a quintessentially American childhood ritual: biting holes into bologna to make a playful “face” with your eyes and mouth. We realized this was more than a silly behavior, but a carefree symbol of youth we could transform into a new bologna-buying behavior for today.

To bring the behavior back in a powerful way, we gave it an enemy: the beauty industry. For millennial women especially (our bullseye target doing the family shopping) the pressure to ‘take care of themselves,’ reverse aging signs and buy more stuff to do so were hitting them at every turn. Especially during the campaign’s New Years time frame, full of improvement resolutions.

The idea was simple. Create a rejuvenating ‘bologna’ face mask that would hijack the Amazon algorithm to sell real bologna, ultimately helping millennials feel - not just look - young.

The hydrogel face mask was launched through exclusive press outreach targeting top publications on a national scale, owned and paid social, and a diverse range of beauty influencers – all of whom drove to our Amazon.com product page. Supporting content playfully spoofed the seriousness of the beauty industry, supporting the brand’s new “Keep It Oscar” mission to irreverently enjoy the things we take more seriously than we should.

Once they were directed to our bologna mask product page on Amazon.com, we let the Amazon algorithm do the rest. We hacked the algorithm so that consumers started getting served the real, bonafide Oscar Mayer bologna meat because of their interest in our look-a-like beauty mask.

Our outreach strategy put our face mask into the hands (and onto the faces) of celebrities and influential people for our millennial mom audience, who is highly influenced by celebrities to buy products1. These elements worked together to spread the word about our bizarre and intriguing product at warp speed, encouraging people to try it for themselves and share their own experiences with our “meaty” masks to amplify earned impressions and perpetuate the consumer journey through to conversion.