Pringles brings pop-up 'Stack Shack' to NYC

Dive Brief:

Kellogg Company brand Pringles is running a three-day out-of-home (OOH) activation with a pop-up "Pringles Stack Shack" in New York City's Times Square featuring TV personality Adam Richman, according to a press release.
The Kellogg Company brand pop-up runs from Oct. 18-20 and aims to encourage snackers to stack different flavors of Pringles chips together to form unique taste combinations, per the release.
While the promotion is an offline experience, Pringles is using the hashtag #PringlesStack as a hub to help people track the event on social media.

Dive Insight:

Pringles' latest effort is based on consumers' creativity in building flavor stacks of chips, an entertaining way to directly connect with people in Times Square and generate buzz around the brand through a fun experience. While the campaign doesn't include a heavy emphasis on social media, it will likely leverage user-generated content from people who visit the pop-up installation and snap photos of their snack creations to share online via the dedicated hashtag.

Partnering with Adam Richman, who is known for hosting food-related shows on the Travel Channel, appears to be a smart move, as he has experience with hosting creative food events and has a relatively expansive social media presence to boost the pop-up's reach online. So far, he's already shared some of his Pringles flavor stack creations to entice visitors, including a "quesadilla stack" of fiery chili lime, spicy queso and salsa fiesta chips.

Pop-up activations have been a popular marketing tactic this year, even as much of brands' marketing budgets are being put toward digital experiences. Overall, experiential marketing can help marketers break through with consumers who are tried of traditional ads.

The Pringles Stack Shack isn't the first OOH campaign to leverage the bustling hub of New York for an event. In July, sparkling water brand Perrier hosted The Perrier Flavor Studio in Soho, New York City, to stoke visitors' senses in a socially shareable way. In August, Behr Paint built an experiential house in Grand Central Terminal that used virtual reality to promote its first "color of the year." Most recently, SunTrust Bank's online lending arm LightStream said it is constructing a mini forest of real trees in Times Square to represent the number of loans it's provided to consumers since it launched in 2013.