Our team has seen, both online and offline, that people have been conditioned to take a passionate stance on trivial debates, especially if it’s about self behavior. Mixed nuts are inherently a product that can be eaten two very distinct ways, yet this has never been discussed. We had every reason to believe stirring up an argument around one’s behavior of eating mixed nuts would be an instant hit with this audience. And it was.

Planters Deluxe Mixed Nuts are a 106 year old snack. People love them, but they

tend to get distracted by other flashier newer snacks, especially on big snacking

days like the Super Bowl. We needed to find a way to bring mixed nuts to the

forefront of America’s mind leading up to the Super Bowl. Our objective? Cut

through the snack chat clutter and get people talking about mixed nuts on the

biggest snacking day of the year. We needed to find a way to remind people how

much they loved this snack and reignite their passion for them. In America, in

2022, if you want to get people talking about something, you don’t start a conversation about it, you start a fight.

Planters knew if we wanted people to care about mixed nuts, we needed to make them topical and give people a new reason to talk about them. We knew the Super Bowl was the prime time to stir up our debate. Because the Super Bowl isn’t just when America gets together to watch football, it’s when they get together to weigh in on some of the biggest moments in culture.

Leading up to the Big Game, we built up our campaign with a simple question - “Do you eat mixed nuts all together or one at a time?” We introduced this debate on social to everyone who would be gearing up for that very day. All with the intention of getting a new conversation about mixed nuts started that would carry us through to game day.

After learning the brand wanted to get mixed nuts on Super Bowl snack tables, and get people talking about it, we sent out a singular social post proposing the debate that generated thousands of responses with the same vigor we expected from our learnings, which informed our Super Bowl concept. We combined these learnings with data on how divided America has become and how much people love to debate everything with equal vigor. In 2022, from politics to social threads to reality TV, it doesn’t matter what the debate is about, Americans can’t not weigh in.

At a time when the internet was a primary cause of dividing people down to every minor difference of opinion, we chose to have fun with it and stir up a nationwide debate over the right way to eat mixed nuts. Once you ask someone if they eat their mixed nuts one at a time or all together in a big old handful, people can’t not weigh in. We leaned into this insight and it delivered. Everyone has an opinion on this seemingly simple question. And as soon as you ask it, people suddenly become very passionate about mixed nuts.

280 Million Engagements and 2 billion media impressions. Just as predicted, on every piece of content, we saw people passionately defending the way they ate mixed nuts. In a time in America where no one can put out an opinion without it leading to politics, this is a topic people could stick to and had a 95% positive/neutral sentiment across all touchpoints. We gave America something to argue about, but in a sense, brought them together no matter what side they were on. People couldn’t agree on how to eat mixed nuts, but they could certainly agree that this was a snack they cared about - enough to endlessly debate it.