For the past year, Johnsonville employees have been responsible for all of the company’s advertising. So when the Super Bowl came around, we took that concept to the next level and had real sausage employees star in the world’s most intense sausage reality show ever: The Sausage Dome.

We partnered with the acclaimed makers of the reality TV show Swamp Hunters to bring this series to life, in which real sausage fans from across America pitched their game-day recipes to six real-life Johnsonville employees also known as the Sausage Six. In each episode, three contestants, ranging from a 13-year-old wonder chef to a cop to an Italian grandma, gave it their all for a chance to have their recipe immortalized as a Johnsonville official game day recipe.

Our idea showcased a range of Johnsonville sausage products, fans and real employee personalities, and proved to inspire great recipes for game day.

We needed to connect with this target in a way that was entertaining and provided utility in advance of their game-day party prep.

In the weeks leading up to the big game, we seeded The Sausage Dome episodes and content via the channels and platforms that our millennial target used, such as Evite (a digital event invitation and management site used to save the date for the big-game party), contextually targeted online videos (around both cooking and entertainment content), social media (to direct traffic to our creative assets) as well as Roku (an over-the-top smart TV device). We ramped up our activity accordingly as game day approached.

All assets were designed to drive traffic back to our microsite, where we hosted the full-length episodes, bonus employee bios and, most importantly, the recipes for the dishes featured on the show for viewers to use in their game-day party planning.

“The Sausage Dome” campaign strongly delivered against our objective of driving consideration for Johnsonville.

-Our teasers and trailers reached a wide audience and garnered 10.9M views. Consumers who were reached with the full episodes, along with those who clicked through from trailers, contributed 585.3K episode views

-Visitors spent more than five minutes on the campaign’s digital hub, which was roughly four times higher than the average time spent on Johnsonville.com

-26,370 site visitors (46% higher than our initial projection) viewed one of our featured recipes, which required them to navigate beyond the landing page by either scrolling down or clicking to the recipes section of the digital hub

We also learned that integrating recipe content in an entertaining and culturally relevant way piqued the interest of many publications, generating 23.8M earned impressions (253 times higher than what we saw in a previous campaign).