The First Edible Mascot (case study)

2024 Clio Awards Grand winner.

Pop-Tarts has a history of putting a Crazy Good spin on classic flavors, and the brand wanted to bring that approach to college football in the first-ever Pop-Tarts Bowl. The winning team dumped Pop-Tarts all over their coach at the 2023 Pop-Tarts Bowl. Pop-Tarts is a beloved brand that consumers see as a breakfast staple, but we were tasked with putting the brand at the center of a broader snacking conversation.

By bringing all the “ingredients” that make the brand iconic into the college football world, we put food and flavor at the center of the entire Pop-Tarts Bowl experience, highlighting the brand’s place at the table well beyond morning hours. For sixty years, Pop-Tarts has sacrificed everything for flavor. So why would our mascot be any different? Knowing mascots are the ultimate symbol of team spirit, we wanted to go above and beyond to wow the crowd. Thus, the first-ever edible mascot was born… then eaten.

This became the single-biggest Pop-Tarts earned campaign ever. Seven times as many people searched for the brand on game day versus the annual average, driving the brand’s biggest day in nearly a decade. The campaign garnered over 4 billion impressions, acquired $1 million worth of first-party data, and generated 15 times more brand mentions than the ten other non-Kellanova-sponsored bowl games combined. Fans created an overwhelming amount of memes, social responses, videos, and GIFs. Our edible mascot was at the center of it all, with over 80% of the game-related coverage, and the New York Times declared that the Pop-Tarts Bowl “won the internet.”