Work Overview:

Develop a campaign idea that would re-invigorate the Cap'N character, increase brand awareness, and resonate with a male 25-35 year-old target demographic.

Season 1 Execution:

An animated online talk show titled "The Cap'n Crunch Show" where the Cap'N and his sidekicks interview celebrities such as Burt Reynolds in a bowl of cereal. The campaign was highly successful and resulted in a 120% increase in monthly Facebook virality, 150% increase in monthly retweets and reach, and a 216% increase in monthly favorite tweets.

In addition, the campaign featured the "Crunchgate" incident, as it came to be called where the Cap’n found himself embroiled in scandal when a Reddit user pointed out that although U.S. Navy captains have four stripes on their uniforms, Cap’n Crunch only has three, and therefore is not a real captain. As this accusation spread through Reddit, Quaker and the Cap’n’s social media team at Huge jumped on the opportunity to get involved by responding to fans with tweets defending the Cap'N.

This exploded into a full-blow controversy as food bloggers, long time Crunch-lovers and even a spokesperson for the U.S. Navy itself weighed in. Stephen Colbert did a segment, and shows from Good Morning America to Anderson Cooper 360 featured the incident. The campaign culminated with a video response from the Cap’n himself, officially and publicly responding to the incident.

Season 2 Execution:

For the second season, the challenge was executing episodes faster due to the success of the "Crunchgate" incident. As the Executive Producer, I was tasked with building a specialty team of animators, art directors, producers, and designers to produce real time animated episodes. By doing so, I eliminated the need to hire a third party production company by research and development of our own specialty character animation rig. The new technical solution allowed a smaller group of animators to create content via a puppet rig that was built to accommodate all of the characters unique expressions and speech patterns. Episodes were written, produced, and pushed live within 5 business days.

Role:

Executive Producer.

Awards

Digiday SAMMY Award - Best Twitter Branding Campaign //2013, Digiday PR Awards - Twitter Communications // 2013, Digiday PR Awards - WOW! Campaign