When Solo Stove wanted to go from “niche fandom” to “mainstream fame,” they knew they needed a level of awareness their budgets couldn’t buy. So we employed the most powerful tools in culture to make the brand a household name, an influencer idea launched exclusively in social. The key selling proposition for their fire pit is “smokeless,”so we enlisted Snoop Dogg, a renowned cannabis enthusiast synonymous with smoke. The campaign sparked a frenzy that broke the internet twice, first when he announced he was “giving up smoke,” and again, at the reveal it was a campaign for fire pits.

Solo Stove went from Kickstarter to IPO without ever advertising on a national scale, but in order to continue their pace of growth, they needed to expand beyond their traditional audience of outdoor enthusiasts. They developed products better suited for the backyard than the backcountry, but a shift of offerings doesn’t automatically equate to a shift in audience, so they needed a campaign to go beyond their outdoorsy core.

With a microscopic media budget and no mainstream awareness, the opportunity was to leverage PR and social to stir up a conversation about the brand, among a wider audience that traditionally wouldn’t consider them. The primary benefit is Solo Stove’s no-smoke ambiance, so we looked for someone known for just the opposite. An unlikely mouthpiece who happened to reach a cross-section of culture: Snoop Dogg.

Snoop was more than talent, we leveraged his incredible instincts as an entertainer and empowered him to have fun with the stunt. That collaboration unlocked cultural impact far beyond the collaborations with the 40+ brands he’s represented in the past. The difference was an invitation to leverage his persona in a way that felt organic, genuine and real. And because we kept the product out of the initial post, we were able to lay the groundwork for buzz in a way that kept everyone (including celebrities, media personas and economists) engaged in the campaign’s development at every twist and turn. In addition to viral success, it expanded their audience to reach more diverse and urban audiences.

The brief was to raise awareness and make Solo Stove a household name, which we accomplished in a mere 13 days. Having never run a national ad campaign, Solo Stove bought into our vision of a creator-led stunt designed to earn media via social and PR, followed quickly by traditional media (TV, radio, OOH and performance digital). The integrated campaign was born from Solo Stove’s brand strategy; the insight that steered the creative concept was that while some people feel right at home in the great outdoors, others require a familiar comfort to fully relax. The strategy and tagline, “we fixed fire,” shed light on the company’s transformation of the earliest human invention: fire. Solo Stove took the smoke out of their pits and made fire into an experience you actually could enjoy, welcoming a broader audience to an outdoor experience the brand was uniquely suited to deliver.

The creative platform centered around “going smokeless” aimed to raise awareness of brand and primary product benefit. We cast Snoop Dogg for his international, multigenerational pop-culture iconicity and synchronicity with “smoke.” Outside of his music career, his endeavors seep into the cannabis industry, from investments to digital media to legal sale of the product itself.

He was an intentional casting choice to appeal to a new audience that had little overlap with Solo Stove’s usual outdoorsy core. He wasn’t just selling an LTO stove; Snoop was selling a lifestyle, one bolstered by his universal appeal, not just among hip-hop lovers, but Martha Stewart lovers and every demographic in between. Snoop broadened the perception of who the outdoors is “for” in our multimedia campaign that lit up social and then spread like wildfire across mass media.

The strategy was to convey the functional RTB (“smokeless”) in a way that would capture outsized attention and create awareness through pop-cultural intrigue and entertainment. With a price point in the hundreds, we needed to get people talking first about smoke and then about Solo Stove. After Snoop bought in on the concept, we devised a social strategy to flame the rumor encompassing our RTB (that Snoop was in fact giving up smoke) and deliver it where people go for celebrity gossip — social. To disguise the stunt and dodge the legal restrictions of the damning #ad, we kept the product out of the initial announcement. Snoop’s tweet caught on like wildfire, and soon the whole world was talking about smoke. Once the second piece of media deployed, the launch video from Snoop’s owned social channels, the whole world talked about smoke again, this time in relation to Solo Stove.

We started with a salacious social announcement from our official “smokesman,” Snoop Dogg. It was deliberately vague and free of brand mentions in order to feed consumers’ voracious interest in celebrity news, entertainment and the cultural conversation de jour. To build intrigue, we allowed the announcement to live unaddressed for four days, while executing embargoed outreach to tip off top tier publications.

Meanwhile, Snoop fueled the narrative, posting cryptic photos surrounding his “newfound smokeless lifestyle.” Next, we dropped brand film in the place culture had been obsessed with following: Snoop’s social. The story trended again as influencers, outlets and obsessives who had been speculating about why Snoop “gave up smoke” circled back to their audiences to explain what was really going on.

We launched 30+ assets across TikTok, X and Instagram in 13 days. Fighting the noisy Thanksgiving holiday, traditional media reinforced “smokeless” as social set the internet ablaze.

“Snoop goes smokeless” more than delivered on its KPI of brand awareness, increasing unaided awareness +250% and generating +$100 million in earned media value, far beyond what the brand could have afforded to spend.

From earning 5,629 unique media placements across 68 countries; to driving exponential social reach (Insta / 52.3M views, +6,179% Snoop’s average, X / 61.7M views, +3,147% Snoop’s average, TikTok / 53M views, +4,582% Snoop’s average) and engagement (Solo’s posts received +49,775% engagement than their average), the campaign was an unquestionable upper funnel success.

But it wasn’t just wildly successful at building awareness for the brand, it also drove consideration, purchase intent and sales. +195% amazon shopping search, +167% google shopping search, +356% email sign-ups, +70% in affiliate revenue, +20% average order value, and a 22% drop in customer acquisition costs, in what amounted to the 4 highest sales weeks of 2023.