Auntie Anne’s Nugg Bowl -

The ultimate Game Day Strategy

Creative Director: Larry Clark

Animators: Primal Screen

 

Update:

Nugg Bowl won an Atlanta Marketing Marketer of the Year Award (AMY) in the Business to Consumer category for our successful, impactful digital campaign.

The Challenge:

Consumers LOVE Auntie Anne’s, but our stores are in malls, which consumers are going to less often these days. Digital ordering makes Auntie Anne's more convenient and accessible to guests outside the mall, but consumers just don't know they offer it.

Objective: Increase awareness of Auntie Anne’s digital ordering and delivery by activating a key sports-watching and snacking occasion, like football.

Timing: Interest is built throughout the season, but Super Bowl Sunday is the primary group-watching/snacking occasion.

Offering: Snack Stadiums are cardboard football stadium packaging that holds 2 buckets of pretzel nuggets for gameday watch parties. They have an SRP of $50.

Insight: Snack Stadium packaging had been in market for 3-4 years. Research showed that consumers with past purchased had a high re-purchase intent. They cited the uniqueness and fun of the stadium packaging as a key motivator.

The Solution:

What better way to tell people about the Snack Stadium than to bring it to life?!

Bringing the stadium to life created an ownable and unique story where the product placement was seamlessly integrated. It created news, generated excitement, and helped break through a very cluttered space. It also created a repeatable platform that can be leveraged year over year.

We started with the Snack Stadium packaging itself. We updated the design and construction of the stadium to include goalposts to help gamify the stadium. We updated the graphics to display the newly minted Nugg Bowl league shield and highlight the 4 teams (varieties) that would compete for all the pretzels.

We then created snackable, bite-sized content for our social, web, and app properties to increase awareness and generate buzz in an easily accessible touch point for consumers who already love our pretzels. By tapping into our social channels, we included our top fans in the Nugg Bowl storyline. Creating rivalry and allowing fans to pledge their loyalty to their favorite team, trash talk other teams, and predict “who will win Nugg Bowl”.

Nugg Bowl’s playoffs ran in lockstep with PRO football’s playoffs. Nugg teams went head-to-head each week and featured iconic sports moments that had everyone craving game-day snacks. Our exciting content, from tasty trick plays to celebratory cheese dunks, built anticipation, created rivalry, and made the delicious game as fun-filling as it was appetite-filling.

As anticipation grew for Nugg Bowl, we kept our fans up to date with thrilling recaps of each playoff game leading up to the Nugg Bowl. Fans followed the action with gameday highlights, top player stats, leaderboards, and the championship brackets at nuggbowl.com, the league’s official website.

Finally, when the big day arrived, pretzel lovers everywhere got to dig into the gripping coverage of the most monumental event in sports snacking history, the first annual Auntie Anne’s NUGG BOWL. Much like the human-scale big game, Nugg Bowl rocked all the in-your-face excitement audiences crave. We’re talkin’ high-flying offense, bone-crunching defense, play-by-play commentary, cheerleaders, and even touchdown celebrations packed in a thrilling script.

Nugg Bowl created interest, built anticipation, and generated a bunch of buzz for the Auntie Anne’s brand. We also sold a ton of pretzel-filled Snack Stadiums! But ultimately, Nugg Bowl created a new behavior in our consumers. A new way for our guests to interact and enjoy Auntie Anne’s pretzels, at home, without a trip to the mall.

The Results:

The biggest digital sales day in the history of the brand!!

On Super Bowl Sunday:

Snack Stadium Units +93% vs Prior Year (PY)

Digital/off Premise Sales

3PD +120% vs PY 1PD +60% 1PD

For the first time ever, digital sales reached 18% of total system sales.

Success wasn’t limited to Super Bowl Sunday, we were up the full week 1PD +63.5%, 3PD +35%

Total Snack Stadium campaign sales +60% vs PY