Goldfish

The Objective

Driving awareness of a beloved snack

Goldfish crackers have been loved and enjoyed by families everywhere for decades. Goldfish wanted to re-engage adult snackers who grew up on the fish-shaped cracker to encourage them to continue to make the product a part of their lifestyle. With a desire to deliver a more engaging message to this demographic, Goldfish looked to TikTok to drive mass awareness with its target audience.

The Solution

Promoting mass engagement with a snackable Hashtag Challenge

Why eat a few when you can snack by the handful? Goldfish hooked the TikTok community with a campaign and contest designed around the #GoForTheHandful Hashtag Challenge. The contest playfully challenged users to participate and co-create by seeing how many Goldfish crackers they could fit in their hand at one time, with the winner taking home a year's supply of Goldfish.

To make the challenge fun and competitive, Goldfish called on NBA basketball player Boban Marjanovic. Boban has the largest hands in NBA history, measuring at an estimated 10.75 inches long and 12 inches wide. The contest kicked off with a TikTok of Boban counting the fish and calling out the numbers as he upped the ante of the competition, eventually topping out at 301 Goldfish. Users were then encouraged to Duet with the NBA star as they tried to get as many Goldfish in their hands as possible. The TikTok community attempted to beat out Boban's count and got creative in how they could achieve the ultimate handful.

Goldfish worked with TikTok creators like @matt_steffanina and @taylor_thatdancer to inspire users and get the competition going. Goldfish also elevated the creator content with In-Feed Ads to introduce the brand and the Hashtag Challenge authentically while helping to increase participation among the TikTok community. To make an even bigger splash, Goldfish also used One Day Max In-Feed Ads for high impact.

In addition to combining ad products, the campaign also leveraged multiple alpha/beta opportunities. Goldfish used a Hashtag Challenge Emoji as a unique way to get immediate brand recognition from users. The bright orange goldfish included alongside the hashtag garnered nearly 3 billion emoji impressions and 805,000 emoji clicks. The creative also included an account button so users could go directly from the Hashtag Challenge page to the brand's GoldfishSmiles TikTok account. Finally, the Hashtag Challenge included links to contest rules in the app, along with a 'Learn More' button directing users to Pepperidge Farm's website.

Hundreds of thousands of users were committed to making handful attempts, and they were so vested in beating Boban that they called on other NBA stars to join the challenge. Goldfish reacted to users in real-time and brought NBA player Tacko Fall to the challenge. Meeting TikTokers' request, Tacko dueted with Boban, going for the handful with his 10.5-inch long hands. The Duet, which launched post-campaign, swam on the challenge's success, with the Tacko's TikTok reaching over two million organic views.*

*As of November 2021

The Results

Impact by the handful

The snack that smiles back had the TikTok community smiling right back, too. The campaign delivered a big cultural moment for Goldfish with the mass awareness play and participation they were after. The Branded Hashtag Challenge had 2.9 billion video views, with over 1.8 million creations from 923,000 creators. Moreover, the Hashtag Challenge page garnered over 548 million engagements for a 19% engagement rate, far exceeding the benchmark.

Meanwhile, the #GoForTheHandful tagline was used in television ads and other platforms, driving people to TikTok to participate. The Boban-sized handful was everywhere, and it grabbed users' attention too: standard and One Day Max In-Feed Ads delivered an 11% video completion rate, and a post-campaign Brand Lift Study showed a 19.2% increase in ad recall, beating out the Kantar Norm* by 7.7%. The campaign was such a success that Goldfish has continued to use the #GoForTheHandful tagline, completely changing the game on how people snack.

*Across 115 salty snack studies from the last three years

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