Next month, the Campbell Soup Company will ask shareholders to approve renaming the 155-year-old business to The Campbell’s Company. Even if that happens, Campbell’s will likely remain synonymous with soup, and consumers will still know what the Campbell’s Chunky brand has inside the can: big hunks of meat and protein that make it “the soup that eats like a meal.” 

Chunky has toyed with double entendres around those “hunks” by casting two beefy football greats — New York Giants nose tackle Dexter Lawrence and retired Philadelphia Eagles center (and pop culture phenom) Jason Kelce — in its latest campaign. The effort, created with Publicis agency Leo Burnett, kicked off Sept. 9 and will run across TV and online video, including during football broadcasts on Amazon, NBC, ESPN, CBS and beyond.

In his 15-second spot, Lawrence eats soup at the gym, his biceps tearing through his t-shirt and a “Stay Sexy” decal — a nod to his "Sexy Dexy" nickname — visible on the mirror. For his part, Kelce dons a robe and lays out in front of a fireplace, sipping soup on a bearskin run. The spots speak to Chunky’s emphasis on football and flavor.

“As we embarked on our ambitions this year, it was really focused on bringing meaning and personality to those product attributes that are really differentiating relative to competition and particularly interesting relative to bringing younger consumers to the category,” said Pete Herron, marketing director at Campbell’s.

The ads support the two pillars of Chunky’s brand identity — beefy and spicy — while continuing to lean into humor and not take the brand too seriously en route to breaking through creatively and bringing more attention the category.

A game won in the trenches

Countless brands rushed to partner with the NFL and its players for campaigns geared to the start of the football season. For Chunky, an NFL partner since 1998 and the sponsor with the second longest tenure, finding the right talent was crucial to the campaign.

“When you think about who our consumers are, there’s the classic advertising archetypes, like the everyman consumer,” Herron said. “It’s someone who isn’t necessarily always celebrated, but is the one that always gets the work done and is always reliable.”

While many brands turned to players at so-called skill positions like quarterback (hello, Brock Purdy), Chunky made the deliberate choice to focus on offensive and defensive linemen: The players who drive the outcomes of games but without the notoriety or glamor of their football-handling teammates. 

“We thought there was a really nice symmetry with who our consumer is,” Herron explained. “For us on the Chunky brand, it was a really fun way to try to pull through the NFL talent partnership.”

With Lawrence, Chunky secured a defensive lineman who is not only one of the best players on the field, but also a charismatic and charming character off the field. The brand paired “Sexy Dexy” with popular Chunky variety Chili Mac and played up the asymmetry and humor of someone eating soup at the gym.

Capitalizing on Kelce

Kelce’s partnership with Chunky dates back to a campaign last year that saw him in an ad alongside his brother Travis and mother Donna. The spot, called “Bragging Rights,” followed the brotherly face off at Super Bowl LVII.

Since then, the Kelce brothers have become ubiquitous in media, due largely in part to Travis’ relationship with Taylor Swift and Jason’s post-career, off-field antics (The pair recently signed a reportedly $100 million three-year deal with Amazon’s Wondery for the rights to their podcast, “New Heights.”). But Jason brings more than cultural cache to his Chunky spot.

“It really was this great intersection for us to be able to leverage him as this real, connective tissue to the every man, but also, he has the type of personality to really pull through the humor in a pretty compelling way,” Herron said. 

Having Jason Kelce lying in a robe on a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace might not work for every brand, even if it is more PG than Burt Reynolds’ iconic 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold. Herron attributes the ease of figuring out the new Chunky campaign from a weekly meeting between brand and agency called, appropriately, Monday Morning Quarterbacks.

“We would all jump on a Teams call and talk about our different teams, or different things we were seeing in culture, and different reactions to things we were seeing… We got to know each other, and then we really got a feel for one another’s sense of humor,” Herron said. “Humor … can be collective, but it takes a while to get there.”