Dive Brief:

• Oscar Mayer on Monday (June 17) launched the latest iteration of its “Keep It Oscar” brand platform to promote the packaged food marketer’s Thick-Cut Bacon product, per details shared with Marketing Dive. 
• Creative features sizzling bacon and a voiceover about the brand’s 12-hour smoking process before cutting to seemingly unrelated commercials for lip gloss and men’s razors. In a twist, it’s revealed that the bacon is still being smoked in the background of the fake ads.
• Developed and produced by regular partner Johannes Leonardo, the campaign will run in online video, social media and display channels, with streaming elements across iHeart Radio, Twitch and sports mediums.

Dive Insight:

Oscar Mayer’s latest campaign highlights the value proposition of its Thick-Cut Bacon — a smoking process that’s six to eight hours longer than other brands in the category, the marketer claims — by interrupting ads for fake products.

The spots, airing in 30- and 15-second versions, start with the familiar sights and sounds of sizzling bacon. After a title card, new ads begin, with one touting a fictional Glimmiér lip gloss and another marketing a men’s razor brand. Each fake commercial borrows from category tropes, like a close-up of a woman applying lip gloss or a “Tron”-like animation demonstrating a razor blade cutting through hairs. The ads then cut to bacon being smoked in the corner of the commercial’s set to call out the long smoking process.

“All bacon ads are about bacon, but when your bacon is smoked longer than most, sometimes your bacon ad will run into a beauty ad, or a shaving ad,” said Zack Roif, creative director at creative agency Johannes Leonardo, in a statement. “When the regular 15-second media buy just isn’t enough time to demonstrate how long we smoke your bacon, we took aim at disrupting all the other ads to prove our point.” 

Hacking ads for fake products recalls previous marketing efforts that have caught the attention of consumers. Fox streamer Tubi made waves with a Super Bowl spot last year that made it seem as if someone accidentally changed the channel during the big game. Similarly, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter parodied luxury perfume ads by spotlighting a fake scent called “Pas de Beurre.”

Along with Johannes Leonardo, the Oscar Mayer campaign leveraged Carat U.S. and GroupBlack for paid media, Cashmere for cultural marketing, The Kitchen for social media and Zeno Group for PR. The effort will appear across iHeart Radio, Twitch and sports media, as both gaming and music index highly with the marketer's audience of multicultural millennials, per Oscar Mayer. 

“At Oscar Mayer, our goal is to ‘Keep It Oscar’ in everything we do by bringing a sense of fun and levity to the everyday,” said Shelby Max, brand communications manager for Oscar Mayer. said in a statement. “We opted to meat [sic] them in unexpected ways to challenge the traditional paid media mix.”

Previous Oscar Mayer campaigns under the “Keep It Oscar” platform have offered a similar dose of fun. The brand in 2022 introduced “bologna-inspired” face masks that poke at the self-care space and last year partnered with Mint Mobile and local businesses to dole out “A Side of Bacon” for consumers who purchase any three-month Mint Mobile plan.