The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2023–2024
Pop-Tarts makes its own mascot the prize — winning team eats it live at the Pop-Tarts Bowl
A breakfast brand sponsors a college football bowl, invents the first edible mascot, and the winning team toasts and devours it on live TV.
Pop-Tarts (Kellanova) · Weber Shandwick
What it had to solve
Pop-Tarts wanted to move from breakfast into the broader snacking occasion and needed a college-football sponsorship that could not be ignored.
How it works
Pop-Tarts, a sixty-year-old brand people thought of as breakfast, wanted into the wider snacking conversation. It bought its first-ever college football bowl game — the Pop-Tarts Bowl — and needed a way to make a standard sponsorship impossible to ignore.
The answer inverted a mascot cliché: every food brand has a mascot that represents the food; Pop-Tarts made the mascot the food. A human-sized frosted strawberry Pop-Tart walked the sideline all game, and after the final whistle the winning team toasted and devoured it on live television, closing the night with the mascot's face on the trophy being bitten.
The stunt became the story of the game. Weber Shandwick reports 4B+ earned impressions, seven times the brand's usual daily search volume on game day, the biggest Pop-Tarts day in nearly a decade, 80%+ of all game-related coverage centered on the mascot, and 15x more brand mentions than the other ten non-Kellanova-sponsored bowls combined. In the eight weeks after, Pop-Tarts sold 21M+ additional pastries and grew category share through Q1 2024 at about 6% weekly.
The campaign took the Super REGGIE at the 2025 ANA awards, and the New York Times declared the bowl had 'won the internet'.
Why it lands
- It turned the product itself into the entertainment — no scripted ad could compete with a live ritual
- The inversion (food brand eats its mascot) was simple, legible and instantly shareable
- It made a sponsorship the news story rather than a logo on a field
- It created repeatable cultural moments — memes, reactions and next-year anticipation
- It linked directly to a new eating occasion, moving the brand past breakfast
What it did
4B+ earned impressions, seven times the brand's normal daily searches on game day, its biggest day in nearly a decade, and 21M+ extra pastries sold in the eight weeks after — plus a 2025 Super REGGIE award.
What you can take
When a sponsorship slot is generic, make the sponsorship itself the content: give people a ritual they can meme, replay and retell, and the brand becomes the story.
Since then
The edible mascot returned in later Pop-Tarts Bowl editions as a recurring ritual, and the campaign became a reference case for sponsorship-as-content. In 2025 the ANA gave it the Super REGGIE, its top award, crediting it with changing the playbook for food-brand sports sponsorships.
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