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When it comes to Lay’s potato chips, it’s long been difficult to eat just one. On ABC Friday, it may also be difficult to watch a single commercial for the popular snack.
Disney has sold one-third of all domestic Friday advertising inventory on ABC to PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay so the snack giant can run (and rerun) eight different Lay’s potato chip commercials featuring actor Stephen Tobolowsky going through a scenario similar to that. from the 1993 comedy “Groundhog Day” in which he is trapped repeating his actions in a time loop, with a different flavor of Lay each time around (and a growing sense of desperation).
The plan marks the first time Disney has partnered with a single client for a one-day sponsorship. Frito-Lay ads will also appear on Hulu.
In the world of television advertising, “you can buy a ‘view,’ but I can’t buy a ‘like,’ and I can’t buy someone saying, ‘Hey, did you see this?’ That’s worth its weight in gold,” says Chris Bellinger, creative director of PepsiCo Foods US, which includes Frito-Lay products. “That’s what we hope to achieve with this one.” Friday happens to be the same day that Punxsutawney Phil emerges from his burrow to determine how many more weeks of winter are left in the season.
Frito-Lay’s quest to capture consumers’ imaginations with a big spin on linear television breaks many of the major rules of modern marketing. In the streaming era, marketers have made greater use of ad-supported hubs like Peacock or Tubi to serve ads in real time, while TV inventory is often purchased months in advance. Meanwhile, television networks fill their commercial breaks with a wide range of presentations from many different advertisers, ensuring that everyone has a fair shot at the top spots.
But Disney and Frito-Lay appear to have discarded the manual. The “Groundhog Day” plan emerged just two weeks ago, when George Dewey, co-founder of Maximum Effort, the boutique marketing agency he co-owns with actor Ryan Reynolds, approached Bellinger with the idea. The Frito-Lay executive assumed Dewey was talking about preparing for Groundhog Day in 2025.
It was not.
“People can feel the calculation of things done a year in advance. They can feel how many meetings were behind a creative piece,” Dewey says. The “Groundhog Day” plan has a spark because it was done with a small group of people who worked quickly to implement it, he says, a method that goes against the way most advertising is placed. television. Maximum Effort partnered with Jimmy Kimmel’s production company Kimmelot to create the Frito-Lay ads.
To give Frito-Lay what it wanted, Disney had to reorganize Friday advertising “traffic.” The idea of “Groundhog Day” required that ads be placed in prominent spaces in commercial breaks (the first and last place in many “groups”) so that they would not get lost in the typical mix of quick video presentations in television. “Clearly, we already had some partners that were going to be in some of these places,” says John Campbell, senior vice president of entertainment and streaming solutions at Disney Advertising. Lay’s spots will air during “Good Morning America,” “GMA3,” “General Hospital,” “Shark Tank,” “20/20” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
“If you watch ABC, you’ll see these ads,” the executive says.
The concept is reminiscent of a different era on Madison Avenue, when a truly intriguing creative idea often dominated consumer data and digital marketing was unheard of. In the current climate, advertisers have a wealth of information about their customers’ habits that determines where commercials should be placed, and they have begun to rely more on ads that are placed on social media and calibrated for mobile devices.
“We were crazy,” Dan Sanborn, Kimmelot’s chief marketing officer, says of ABC’s plan. “Our goal was to have fun, make people smile and create moments that otherwise wouldn’t exist.”
Some previous relationships helped pave the way. Maximum Effort and Kimmelot have partnered on a number of interesting advertising projects, such as a series of “retro” commercials produced for Kimmel’s classic sitcom reinvention series, “Live In Front of a Studio Audience” on ABC, or a group of commercials. for the finale of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” that featured deceased characters coming back to life as zombies.
Many of the best advertising ideas have great promise, but are often impossible to duplicate. After all, no one has tried to copy Apple’s famous “1984” Super Bowl commercial. At Disney, executives believe they could expand this new model to others. “If it’s innovative and it entertains our consumers, we can expand it,” Campbell says. “We are prepared for it.”