The scene starts with a young boy creating a dog out of Trolli Gummy worms.
The neon pet becomes his best friend and does everything with him. The two are seen jumping on a trampoline together, skateboarding and playing in the grass. Then, all of a sudden, an older boy comes along, sees the puppy made of gummies, grabs its head and takes a bite.
A British voiceover comes on to announce, “Trolli gummi candies. Weirdly Awesome.”
The “Best Friend Ever” ad is just one of a series of ads featured in the new “Weirdly Awesome” campaign Ferrara Candy Co. has launched in conjunction with the Periscope ad agency.
This is the first-ever national marketing push behind the Trolli brand, and it’s aimed at garnering sales for all of its chewy candies, including Sour Brite Crawlers — currently the number one item in the growing gummi category.
Gleaning inspiration from the weird shapes, funky colors and irresistible playfulness of Trolli gummies, the work was created to appeal to teenagers’ absurd sense of fun.
“Our products break away from the rest of the pack. We decided that taking a similarly unexpected approach with our creative made perfect sense,” says Jamie Mattikow, chief commercial officer at Ferrara Candy Co.
Being decidedly offbeat also resonated with the creative team.
“As we dug into the assignment, the thing that we kept coming back to is that weird is the new currency of cool. And Trolli has the ideal amount of irreverence as a brand to pull off weird in an authentic way,” says Charlie Callahan, Periscope’s executive creative director. “So we decided to celebrate weird, honor awesome and spread ridiculousness.”
The campaign centers on blitzing a plethora of outrageous content across teens’ favorite digital platforms in both paid and earned media. The mix aims to keep teens hungry for ongoing delicious weirdness from the brand.
In one ad, “Manicorn,” a boy is sitting at a school lunch table with his friends, wearing a unicorn horn made of Trolli gummy candy. His friends ask if the horn gives him any magical powers and he says no, but he then says there is one thing he can do with it. He pops a cassette tape into the horn, and then gets up and starts dancing as some off-beat music suddenly starts coming from the unicorn horn, while his friends smile from the table.
And in another ad, “Birdboy,” a family seen is sitting around the dinner table talking about their day, when suddenly the camera pans over to a boy dressed in a full bird costume. The mom grabs a handful of Trolli Gummy Crawlers and feeds them to him, while the rest of the family continues to eat dinner as if nothing strange is going on.
Ferrara Candy Co. selected Periscope to handle brand advertising for Trolli in June this year.
“Winning business is always sweet, and in this case, it’s both literal and figurative,” says Greg Kurowski, Periscope president and ceo. “The team presented big thinking that will help move the needle for this iconic brand, and we couldn’t have been happier to add them to our roster. Needless to say, we’ve stocked plenty ofTrolli products to fuel this weirdly awesome work.”
Ferrara Candy Co. is the leading non-chocolate confectionery company in the United States, with a portfolio of iconic brands, including Trolli, Brach’s Black Forest, Lemonhead, Now and Later, and more.
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