• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, December 25, 2024

I’ve been thinking about ads with the most impact over the last year. And I never would have expected that a cruel stunt, waged in the waning days of 2023, involving sprinkles and cannibalism, would be a contender.

But it seems at the time we were out for crumbs, the more perverse the better.

It took place at a halftime show at the Dec. 28, 2023 Pop-Tarts Bowl in Orlando, Florida, a normally forgettable, mid-level college bowl game.

If you recall, one minute, Frosted Strawberry, a giant Edible Pop Tart mascot, was running around the football field on its beige bandy legs, footloose and fancy free.

In the next, the pastry cake willingly went to its death-by-toaster. 

As if to justify the act, Strawberry was made to carry a "Dreams Really Do Come True!" placard, some sort of sadist’s dream.

In a particularly dramatic and savage ceremony, Mr. Tart had to climb up high steps, like a person headed to the gallows. But unlike a hanging death, he was then loaded, head down, into the bright orange burning maw of the toaster’s elements.

Afterwards, he was carried out of the toaster’s side door and Kansas State, the winning team, devoured the electrocuted thing with their hands. 

They pronounced the post-death pastry mass “delicious” and “cakey.”

Still, the Pop Tart Edible Mascot experience turned out to be even more satisfying to a ravenous social media jam. Within the first three days, it generated an estimated $12.1 million worth of media exposure for parent company Kellanova and went on to inspire thousands of memes and over 5 billion impressions.

As an act of advertising, (conceived and executed by Weber Shandwick) the cake’s ritual suicide won a heap of metal, including the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in the Brand Experience and Activation category, as well as a Grand Clio, an Andy IDEA award and a gold Jay Chiat Award -- and was named the Brand Activation of the Year by the Sports Business Journal Awards.

So successful was the act that Kellanova just announced the 2024 Pop-Tarts Bowl will air live on Dec. 28 at 3:30 p.m. ET on ABC.

After frosted strawberry went down in such an ignominious way, the bowl game is introducing three new mascots this year: frosted hot fudge sundae, frosted wild berry and a third mystery flavor.

But the spectacle of sacrifice continues. The game’s MVP will decide which flavor gets the “honor” of being eaten by the winning team.

“The first Pop-Tarts Bowl became one of the year’s biggest memes, and since then, our edible mascot has popped up on red carpets, TV commercials, sold-out Halloween costumes and it continues to get brought up during big cultural moments,” Pop-Tarts director of marketing Heidi Ray said in a release. “And fans are hungry for more.”

I’ve been trying to analyze why the flattened guy was so popular. 

Was the stunt the modern equivalent of a ritual burning at the stake?

Maybe people love to rally behind an absurd figure associated with darkness.

But most of all, it seems we don’t mind advertising when it truly embraces its own absurdity and stupidity, and we’re all in on the joke.

Maybe more advertisers should discover that when you treat the dumbest thing ever as if it’s very, very serious, that’s funny.

Where the hundreds of other brands who have cutesy mascots running around the fields go wrong is that they stop at “cute.”  They fail to capture the blood-thirsty essence of sport!

Indeed, live sports is one of the few things that people still watch in real time, in groups.

And while doing so, they’re desperate to have stuff to join in and talk about other than the plays and the game itself.

The Pop Tart is 2% fake crust and filling and 98% mid-20^th-century branding.

And the edible mascot experience is built on taking extreme branding to its most atavistic, pre-thought level.

What a reverse evolution for the commercial snack cake.

Burn baby, burn!