Junk Food Terrorists

Virtually any CPG advertiser would love it if consumers cared so much about their product that they actually formed an advocacy group around said product. But that doesn’t happen very often (And when it does it usually isn’t very serious—such as “The Friends of Spam”).   

But, of course, you can easily create a FAKE group of people who are fanatical about your product (I have actually done so myself). This is what Cheetos has done. Kind of. But the people in the Orange Underground are not crazy about eating Cheetos, they are crazy about pranking people using Cheetos (I had never heard of this before—does it actually happen? If not, what brilliant insight led to it? Perhaps it’s just a clever ploy to get folks to buy more Cheetos—one of the pranks is filling a car with the tasty orange morsels—growing up in rural Minnesota we would call this a serious waster of food). They call this “performing random acts of Cheetos”. In any case, here is a funny write-up about the multi-media campaign (it also includes TV) courtesy of the amusing folks at AdRants.  

The Orange Underground effort is brought to you by Goodby Silverstein, recently named AdWeek Advertising Agency of the Year, and certainly one of the most successful of the general shops at adapting to the new digital reality. I could be wrong, but I doubt that this work will ultimately be counted among their best at the end of 2008—although I think the site itself is well-done. At this point, it doesn’t seem to be taking off virally, but perhaps it is too early to tell. It just seems to me that the value proposition/entertainment payoff is not strong enough. And I would be surprised if tons of young men (I assume that’s the target here) upload videos of their “Random acts of Cheetos” to the MySpace page. We’ll see. The campaign ends on April Fools Day, when, I imagine, there will be a huge Cheeto prank played out on a national scale.