Dive Brief:
- Tostitos, a PepsiCo Frito-Lay brand, plans to set the "unofficial world record" for the longest livestream of a tortilla chip bowl, with 53 hours to celebrate the Super Bowl's 53rd year, the company announced. The livestream kicks off on Feb. 1 at 1:29 p.m. ET on Tostitos.com and will end one minute before the Super Bowl begins on Feb. 3.
- #TostitosLiveBowl will be hosted at the Tostitos Cantina in Atlanta, where fans and current and former NFL players, including Barry Sanders, Dak Prescott, Matt Ryan, Baker Mayfield, Tony Gonzalez and more, will show off their "chipping and dipping" skills during the livestream. During the livestream, fans can request different flavors of chips to be featured, and the bowl will be refilled regularly. The 53rd person to comment using hashtag #TostitosLiveBowl will win a jar of Tostitos Queso Blanco, and the 53 millionth commenter will be awarded 53 bags of Tostitos tortilla chips.
- The livestreaming tortilla chip bowl is part of Tostitos' "For Every Kind of Fan" campaign around the NFL season and Super Bowl. The brand is also releasing a series of digital spots featuring former NFL player Shannon Sharpe that will serve as "public address announcements" to help people plan their game day watch parties.
Dive Insight:
Instead of airing a pricey mid-game commercial, which costs brands around $5 million per 30 seconds of airtime, Tostitos is focusing its Super Bowl push on the lead-up to the big game in an effort to build brand awareness and drive sales as football fans prepare for their watch parties. The novelty of the #TostitosLiveBowl, which the brand calls "the most epic pregame entertainment possible," could attract attention online while the in-stream giveaways may encourage more people to engage with the brand.
More brands have begun to embrace lengthy livestreams in order to connect with consumers in unique ways, especially those interested in streaming entertainment-related content and looking for something unique and fun they can drop in on. KFC tested the format last summer in a partnership with entertainment website Super Deluxe with a four-hour Facebook livestream of kittens and a seven-foot cat tree shaped like the brand's mascot Colonel Sanders. To encourage interaction with the livestream, KFC promised to add a kitten to the room every time someone shared the video on the social network.
Though not a livestream, Tostitos previously produced a video showing the construction of a 42-layer wedding "cake" made of the brand's chips and dips in celebration of the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The video was posted on Tostitos' Facebook and Instagram channels.
The "public address announcements" digital spots follow Tosito's Super Bowl 2018 campaign, where the Frito-Lay brand similarly aimed to help people with party preparations. The brand launched a digital party invitation creator on its website that let users create personalized video ad invites that featured classic Super Bowl themes, like talking babies and '90s icon Alfonso Ribeiro.
