One key to effective TV advertising is ensuring your creative work and messaging align with the psychological needs your brand fulfills for viewers. If you’re an auto insurance brand, you might strive to communicate the safety and comfort your target audience will experience when they turn to you during a difficult time. If you’re a fashion brand, you’ll probably aim to inspire the sense of cool and self-satisfaction viewers will feel the first time they put on your clothes.
But what about brands in the snack food category? In our recent report on TV ads among leading snack brands like Oreo and Lay's, we found that the most engaging ads were those that demonstrated the joys of collective snacking. In other words, these ads showed that snack foods are more than just a sweet or savory treat we turn to for a little energy boost—they’re often the glue that brings together close friends, family members, and even strangers.
By using our expansive TV ads database and proprietary engagement modeling formula, we analyzed every snack brand ad that ran on TV from March through May 2023. EDO found that ads that showed people joyously sharing snacks were the most likely to inspire consumers to engage with the brand online or visit its website after viewing them.
Here’s a taste of what else you can expect to discover in the full report.
Goldfish scores big by highlighting an unlikely friendship
This spring’s most engaging snack ad stars a pair of NBA players from distant hometowns bonding over a rather large handful of Goldfish. In the ad, the 7-foot-4 Serbian center Boban Marjanović presents his former teammate Tobias Harris, a Long Island native, with a model of his comically massive hand so that Harris can enjoy larger handfuls of the salty snack.
The fun and humorous ad portrayed Goldfish as a communal link between the two real-life friends, and viewers responded enthusiastically. Those who saw the ad were 285% more likely to engage with Goldfish than they were to engage with the average snack ad that ran this past Spring.
The ad shares a narrative thread with both the third- and fourth-most engaging snack food ads during the same period: a Lay's ad in which the Brazilian singer Anitta shares her chips with a brightly colored, multiracial assemblage of dancers and a Spanish-language Oreo ad highlighting the cookie’s place in a relationship between a girl and her grandmother. All suggest that telling emotionally powerful stories to engage audiences can improve a snack brand’s most desired outcome.
Ready for another bag?
Download the full report here and discover how you can increase your TV advertising ROI. Or, if you’d like to take advantage and learn more about how EDO’s wealth of TV advertising performance data can help you optimize your creatives already in flight, we’d love to hear from you. All you have to do is schedule a meeting on our website and save us a bite.