When news broke of Zack ‘Danger’ Brown’s $50,000 potato salad Kickstarter, we saw an opportunity for Jack Astor’s to jump on this crazy phenomenon.

After learning Zack had no idea how to make potato salad, we arranged to fly him to Canada so he could develop his $50,000 recipe with Jack Astor’s Executive Chef.

We then rapidly organized a launch event to unveil the much-anticipated potato-salad. Media, Kickstarter contributors and loads of Jack’s customers were all in attendance to get the first taste of the $50,000 potato salad – not to mention mingle with the now infamous Potato Salad Guy.

After press tours, interviews and media coverage, Jack Astor’s garnered over 80 unique pieces of coverage, generating a whopping 32 million earned media impressions across Canada and the US. This not only blew away our initial objective in terms of number of earned impressions but also in terms of quality of coverage with major national news outlets picking up the story. By connecting the potato salad phenomenon with Jack Astor’s, we reminded our guests of our sense of humour and created tremendous social media buzz for the brand without any paid media.