McCormick and Company didn’t need Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce or even the Kansas City Chiefs for its Frank’s RedHot brand to win Super Bowl 58. It just needed to cover their zone of influence.
Tabata Gomez took McCormick’s CMO role in November after more than six years as a marketing leader with Stanley Black & Decker and more than 12 years managing brands for Procter & Gamble. At the time, McCormick had retail advertising ready to push supplies of Buffalo wing and chicken-dip staple Frank’s RedHot hot sauce during the Super Bowl, but was struggling with a departing agency partner’s AI-driven campaign that wasn’t testing well with audiences.
Roughly three weeks before the Super Bowl, Gomez contacted Jessica Henrichs, president of creative agency Colle McVoy—which had just taken on Frank’s RedHot a few weeks earlier—and told her Frank’s would need a new campaign within 48 hours or would be forced to pull out of the Big Game. Henrichs responded within four hours that there were several food brands advertising in the Super Bowl: Why not pour some versatile Frank’s RedHot on all of them?
Gomez and Colle McVoy contacted talent agency United Entertainment Group—who Gomez worked with extensively at P&G’s CoverGirl brand—and asked if they could find some last-minute talent for their campaign. The agency responded that it was on a shoot with Philadelphia Eagles center and podcast host Jason Kelce… and that McCormick should give him serious consideration.
“They went and asked Kylie [Kelce], his wife, because she was on the shoot, ‘Do you guys like Frank’s?’ and she turns around and says ‘I put that shit on everything, and we love it,’” Gomez said.
Within 24 hours, Jason Kelce confirmed his interest, and within 48 hours a contract was signed. By that time, McCormick and Colle McVoy had only three and a half weeks to make its idea a reality—and only two hours in Las Vegas with Kelce to shoot video in a makeshift hotel-room studio.
The result was 5.39 billion earned media impressions, 11,000 RedHot sweepstakes entries, 60% growth of the Frank’s RedHot email list, more than doubled amount of searches for “Frank’s Buffalo Chicken Dip” and a 71% increase in Instacart Frank’s RedHot buyers who hadn’t purchased the product within the last six months. Henrichs said the campaign’s tight timetable made Frank’s gameplan more nimble, as it capitalized on the moment Kelce went shirtless to support his brother during the Chiefs’ AFC Championship win over the Buffalo Bills.
“Jason Kelce was the most relevant cultural figure probably next to Taylor Swift in that moment leading up towards the Super Bowl,” Henrichs said. “Jason Kelce was not only perfect for the execution, but he could not be more perfect for the brand, given his personality, approachableness and irreverence.”
Frank’s hurry-up offense
Frank’s RedHot has used social-driven, Super Bowl-adjacent campaigns before. But as State Farm and Maximum Effort showed when placing Jake from State Farm next to Jason Kelce early in the 2023 NFL season, keeping up with culture requires impeccable timing.
“Building a Super Bowl campaign, it feels like you’re building a plane as it takes off,” said Ciro Sarmiento, chief creative officer at Colle McVoy “So that was the approach: Let’s make the impossible possible.”
Gomez and Henrichs laid out a list of the brands they wanted for the spot and spent 48 hours contacting CMOs and agencies. By the day of filming, Oreo, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Doritos Dinamita, Oikos Pro, Papa John’s pizza, Drumstick, Jif peanut butter and Starry were among the brands that agreed to have 25 bottles of Frank’s RedHot drizzled over them.
The day of filming, Sarmiento said Kelce walked on set, poured RedHot into his coffee and set to work. The crew opted for minimal hairstyling and makeup to make the most of Kelce’s time. Director Raul B. Fernandez of Cap Gun Collective leaned on his improv background to ask “Is this the best way Jason would express this?” and find room for compromise.
Calling back to Kelce’s shirtless stint in Buffalo, the crew had him film instructions for preparing Buffalo chicken dip that required him to tear off a shirt to reveal each new ingredient. Melanie Sifuentes, McCormick & Company’s vp of global brand marketing and media, noted that Buffalo chicken dip was the top recipe search during the Super Bowl and suggested to Gomez that the brand take ownership of the recipe.
After a microinfluencer campaign around Buffalo chicken dip yielded 3.8 million views on TikTok, Kelce was a bit too enthusiastic in reiterating the recipe on Super Bowl Sunday—tearing off three shirts at once in an early attempt. After his final take revealed a shirt proclaiming “I Put That * On Everything,” Kelce wore it out of the shoot and around the streets of Las Vegas. Within an hour, Gomez’s team got the shirt’s design from Colle McVoy, sent it to partners at Route One Apparel and had it available for sale through its site and social channels.
“In the 21 years that I’ve been doing this, celebrities bring a lot, but they have to have that connection and authenticity that leads to the brand,” Gomez said. “If they don’t, the brand can get overshadowed.”
A team victory
Colle McVoy had seeded out the campaign through its social channels and built its entire program ahead of the Super Bowl, it built a hybrid in-person/remote war room just for game day.
On site, there were two Frank’s RedHot social content managers and 18 Colle McVoy staff members, including account, production, copywriting, art direction, earned creative and influencer specialists. The group worked between two content studios (including one green-screen set) and a main collaboration space with 10 workstations and three televisions streaming the game.
Another 10 brand representatives—including Gomez and members of the marketing, legal, PR and communications teams—attended remotely, as did another eight Colle McVoy staffers. The team had pre-programmed where spots featuring food would run during the game and had planned reactions to specific moments during the broadcast.
“We knew Usher would be there, we knew Reba would be there…when there was a natural intersection with Frank’s we could plan ahead of time for that, and then we had to leave room for magic,” Henrichs said. “It was fun when we saw Jason show up to the game in his game day fit…so we of course had to make the bottle in that same outfit.”
The results landed Frank’s RedHot coverage in TODAY, People, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, Parade and xfDelish, but was more impressive for just how effective it was with consumers. Data from emotion analytics company Dumbstruck found that 90% or more of the 500 viewers who saw the ad and knew Jason Kelce not only liked the ad, the brand and Kelce, but remembered Frank’s RedHot enough to engage with it later. Among those who didn’t know Kelce, roughly 80% to 95% still had a positive view of Frank’s and were similarly inclined to seek it out.
For Gomez and Frank’s, that love came through in entries for the brand’s Big Game sweepstakes. The campaign didn’t just entertain Super Bowl viewers: It found die-hard fans of the brand.
“To have 12,000 people take time out of their lives to send us a story or send images and videos—and some were really curated and thought through and showed how much they loved Frank’s— for me, that is the best reward our brand can get,” Gomez said. “There were folks that were showing us their Frank’s tattoos…it was impressive.”
