Memes help save college bowl season
After winning the Pop-Tarts Bowl on Dec. 28 in Orlando, Fla., Kansas State’s football team gathered on the field around a garage-size toaster that was protected by a pair of mall cops wearing “Snack Security” shirts.
An unusual chant erupted — “Toast that mascot! Toast that mascot!” — as Strawberry, a giant PopTart with limbs, climbed to the top of the toaster, bopping along to the disco-era beat of Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff.”
“We will always love you, Strawberry,” announcer Jason Ryan Perry said over the stadium’s public address system. “Can’t wait to eat you.”
For nearly three hours, Strawberry had worked the crowd as one of the surprise stars of the game — and of the entire college bowl season, which was no small feat for an anthropomorphized breakfast pastry. By the time Strawberry tossed aside a sign that read “Dreams Really Do Come True” so that it could happily slide through a slot and have its crust toasted to golden-brown perfection, the internet was about to crater.
Sure enough, Strawberry soon emerged from the toaster as an edible version of itself. The victorious players pounced, gorging themselves on Strawberry by the handful until all that was left — RIP, Strawberry — was its left eye.
“I think those guys were really hungry,” Heidi Ray, senior director of brand marketing for Pop-Tarts, said in a telephone interview.
In a crowded marketplace, the Pop-Tarts Bowl — renamed this year after having previously been the Cheez-It Bowl, the Camping World Bowl and several other monikers — managed to do something special: elevate an otherwise ordinary game into a viral sensation.
Michigan and Washington will face off in the College Football Playoff national championship game Monday night, but in an era in which there are more than 40 bowl games a season, with only two of them — the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl, serving as national championship semifinals — carrying any sort of significance, the Pop-Tarts Bowl won the internet.
Or, at the very least, it shared the internet championship with the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.
From a competitive standpoint, the playoff system, which made its debut in 2014 and will add quarterfinal games next year, has rendered the other bowls into artifacts of a bygone era when they meant more to teams — and to their conferences — than they do now. As a result, many prominent players with NFL aspirations opt out of the games if there is nothing on the line.
None of that has slowed a steady drumbeat in favor of even more bowl games, which generate decent ratings and advertising revenue around the holidays.
With so many mostly meaningless bowls — the Guaranteed Rate Bowl and the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl, the Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl and the Avocados from Mexico Cure Bowl — the most intense competition is not necessarily between teams on the field but among the brands that are hoping for a fleeting (and profitable) moment of virality.
“I think doing it in unique, fun ways is an important way to keep bowls relevant,” said Miller Yoho, director of marketing and communications for the Charlotte Sports Foundation, which hosts the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. “Honestly, this is the most anyone’s been talking about it in the 10 years I’ve been doing it.”
The Pop-Tarts phenomenon was something to behold, in no small measure because of the exploits of Strawberry, who was played by Barry Anderson, a former mascot for the Chicago Bulls. In its first and only public appearance, Strawberry danced with fans, distributed bitesize versions of itself and welcomed its own demise. (Thanks to the magic of television, Anderson did not actually toast himself.)
“It far surpassed any of our expectations,” Ray said, adding: “We didn’t have to fake anything. That’s totally the brand. That’s how we treat social every day of the year. We just brought a little bit of that world to the world of college football.”
And although Strawberry is now the highest-profile individual PopTart in the brand’s 60-year history, Kellanova produces about 3 billion of the treats annually, Ray said. In other words, Strawberry was not a one-off. There is more talent in the pipeline.
“Everyone witnessed that Strawberry was consumed by the Wildcats, and he’s happily in mouth heaven because his dreams came true,” Ray said. “But fear not: This is not the last time you will see an edible Pop-Tart as the mascot.”