The Super Bowl is the noisiest media moment of the year and it is next to impossible to get any real traction unless the work breaks through culture and attracts a massive amount of earned media. Our CrunchTime program was engineered to give viewers and media outlets a “must see” experience that rivaled the entertainment going on on the TV broadcast. It was critical to have PR driving eyeballs away from the big screen and onto Twitter throughout the game in order to achieve our objectives.

Mr. Peanut is a well-known brand icon having been around for over 100 years, but he had lost his relevance with the modern day consumer and hadn't shown up or spoken up in some time.

The brief a clear directive. Using SuperBowl as a key moment in time, find a unique way to bring Mr Peanut to the game and drive relevance with consumers across America.

The objective was to drive relevancy for Planters by bringing new life to Mr. Peanut; staying true to his iconic nature, legume like features and personality.

Just how do you make a 103 year old nut...er legume, relevant in a big way, during the biggest game of year, on a place that didn't even exist when he was invented? Planters gave their mascot a modern makeover and took him to Twitter during the platform's biggest night of the year, not simply to live tweet, but re-create moments from the game, the halftime show and the commercials in real time, and share them out with the world. A feet that would usually take weeks worth of production, and condensed it in down into mere minutes. Allowing Mr. Peanut to be the belle of the ball game.

Mr Peanut is iconic but has struggled to stay relevant in an ever-changing world where 103 years of experience isn't enough to get you invited to the party.

The Insight: Mr Peanut has always been looked at for knowledge on the things that matter.

The Idea: Make Mr Peanut the most sought after social commentator during the Super Bowl by not only bringing live action but new moves to game night.

The Target Audience: Snack eating American men enjoying the Super Bowl, who are humor driven and deeply passionate about game-time commentary.

Creation and Deployment: We deployed this real-time animation on Twitter with real-time media buying and real-time KPI tracking to optimize in real-time. Oh and real-time pitching to PR as we gained traction. Lots of real-time happened to yield lots of success.

Our PR approach rolled out in 3 distinct phases – pre-game, during and post-game.

For pre-game, we leveraged the A-list stars from our TV commercial and our iconic mascot, to get dozens of media outlets to cover our teaser commercials announcing that we were doing something big for Super Bowl. This phase started two weeks before the game and garnered billions of earned impressions.

When the game started, we immediately established Mr. Peanut’s role on social media with a series of planned executions – designed in partnership with specific influencers and media outlets. When our TV spot ran we pushed out a selfie that featured all the influential talent in our spot. This post delivered millions of impressions in minutes and continued to build massive PR momentum as the game went on.

The post-game phase included PR support about the entire program – highlighting the “never been done before” elements.

4.6B media impressions

10M organic impressions

200K mentions on Twitter

+5.6% increase in nut consumption

75% SOV in salty snacks category

91% positive sentiment

4.6B media impressions

10M organic impressions

200K mentions on Twitter

+5.6% increase in nut consumption

75% SOV in salty snacks category

91% positive sentiment