What Jason Kelce’s spicy TikTok ad for Frank’s RedHot says about pop culture advertising
McCormick CMO Tabata Gomez shares the recipe for that viral Jason Kelce ad.
Aside from anyone named Patrick, Travis, or Taylor, perhaps the most talked about—and meme’d—name before, during, and after the Super Bowl was Jason Kelce. What began with a shirt-ripping scream in Buffalo, culminated with a little hip thrusting at a victory party in overalls and a lucha libre mask.
Between those two iconic moments, Kelce starred in a Super Bowl social campaign for Frank’s RedHot, encouraging people to not only make their wings dip with the sauce, but to go along with its tagline, “Put that sh*t on everything.”
The brand didn’t have an official Super Bowl commercial; instead it opted to make its biggest push in the days before, since that’s when most people stock up on Frank’s for wings sauce and dips (Kelce also starred in social posts throughout the game). Despite that timing, the brand’s work scored more than 3 billion media impressions within its first 24 hours, and more than 4.6 billion as of publishing this story.
While the big game is long over, and Kelce has put away the wrestling mask, there are lessons in how Frank’s approached the Super Bowl that will help it continue its attention-winning ways.
McCormick chief marketing officer Tabata Gomez had been at the company for just three months when her team showed off its Super Bowl plan for Frank’s RedHot. With three weeks to go before the game, she decided to scrap those plans and aim for something more in the moment.
“I was looking at the work we were launching, and the idea was good; but in testing, it wasn’t going as well as expected, so I just didn’t think that risk was worth the reward,” says Gomez. “It was a hard call, but I decided to pivot and not do it. We didn’t have another idea.”
Gomez and her team gave themselves 48 hours to come up with something else. Working with agency Colle McVoy, they decided to really lean into the tagline. “There were going to be more food ads than ever, so we thought, if Frank’s makes everything better, why not put it on every food that was being advertised during the game?” says Colle McVoy president Jessica Henrichs.
As they were trying to figure out just how to bring that idea to life, Kelce made national headlines for ripping off his shirt to celebrate the Chiefs win against the Buffalo Bills, while watching the game with Taylor Swift. It was a marketing opportunity miracle. Contact was made and within two days, the deal was done. “He’s such a great fit for Frank’s, so the goal from there was to let him be himself,” says Gomez.
The video shoot happened in Vegas, the week of the Super Bowl, and the work started to roll out by Friday, February 9. The showpiece being a video of Kelce ripping off multiple shirts to reveal the recipe for Buffalo Chicken Dip.
Obviously there is a perfect storm aspect to this entire campaign: Kelce was interested in working with the brand and a massive cultural figure of the moment. But for Gomez, that’s the whole point.
“My philosophy is that you can plan out 80%, and plan it out well, but you have to leave 20% for embracing the agility around cultural moments,” says Gomez. “It’s about how you lay out your processes, your systems, to be able to respond quickly to cultural moments. We are a CPG company, we’re in the middle of pop culture, and if we’re not set up to be a part of that, we’re not going to win. So this was a perfect example of how we need to be prepared to act.”
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