Wonderful Pistachios leveraged football fever with a set of deadpan comic commercials starring Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman and Green Bay Packers linebacker Clay Matthews and several ‘lovable loser’ football fans.
The $55m campaign, called ‘Put A Smile on Your Snackface’, revolves around a silly series of dark, deadpan ads featuring football fans with incredibly unfortunate lives, but who just can’t stop smiling while eating Wonderful Pistachios.
The series of 30- and 15-second spots all uncover unfortunate comedy through over-the-top tales of misfortune as told by either Sherman and Matthews.
For example, Jim has a broken leg, is chased by tornados, who saw someone else’s life flash before his eyes during a near death experience, who’s third wife ran off with his second wife and who’s daughter’s first words were ‘This isn’t working, Jim’ still smiles when he eats Wonderful Pistachios.
Other spots in the series include.
While the initial brief for the initiative was for a digital campaign, but the brand felt the ads were so strong it should run them in a NFL national TV broadcast campaign.
The campaign now spans TV, digital, print, PR, in-store and point-of-sale and the commercials debuted on 10 September as endorsers Sherman and Matthews face off against one another when the Seattle Seahawks play the Green Bay Packers in the first week of the season.
The ads will then continue to run through primetime NFL games and online sports sites throughout the season.
The ‘Put A Smile on Your Snackface’ campaign saw in-house Wonderful Agency work with the brand’s pre-existing NFL athlete ambassadors and was developed on a creative idea to contrast the success of these endorser’s with the imagined opposite characters to avoid ‘a dry focus on the benefits of eating pistachios’.
Thus, Sherman and Matthews represent ‘winners’ (with career, personal and financial success) while the creative asked themselves ‘who would be the opposite of them and what would their life be like?”
“The challenge was I didn’t want to make a straight, medicinal health message,” says Wonderful Agency’s in-house Chief Creative Officer Darren Moran
“It had to be entertaining first and foremost and had to feel like a snack before a ‘good for you snack.’”
With the conceptual idea developed, Moran asked his copywriters to leave five possible ad lines in a basket on his desk every day before leaving the office – including during the period after which they’d actually started shooting the spots.
Moran estimates that around 30 lines made it into the commercials out of the 1,000 written by the team.
In fact, some of the lines were even written on set.
Comment:
The darker side of comic commercials certainly requires a delicate balance.
Ads that revolve around absurd scenarios of woe really need to find the right tone to engage and appeal and, in our opinion, these spots do just that.
The new season campaign follows in the footsteps of the brand’s 2016/17 NFL season work which was led by a series of ads and social spots starring Sherman,
and videos featuring John Cena as the brand’s mascot Ernie the Elephant.
Links:
Wonderful Pistachios
https://www.wonderful.com/brands/wonderful-pistachios.html
https://www.youtube.com/user/wonderfulpistachios
https://www.facebook.com/wonderfulpistachios
