Jennifer Aniston Brings Star Quality to SkinnyPop

SkinnyPop earn our Ad Of The Week this week with their new “Popular for a Reason” creative platform and brand refresh. The Hershey’s-owned brand is a relatively young name in the snacks sector – 15 years – but it’s been at the vanguard of a shift towards healthier snacking and the new platform capitalizes on that legacy and prominence.

What most people will notice about the campaign, though, is its central role for Jennifer Aniston. The Friends actress is enjoying a new wave of prominence thanks to the show’s popularity on Netflix and the ad finds the funny side of her celebrity status. SkinnyPop have been careful to reassure audiences that this is an authentic partnership – Aniston genuinely likes the product and was involved in the creative side of the campaign, which was put together by agency Erich & Kallman.

In the ad, Aniston is checking into a hotel, a bag of SkinnyPop in hand. The concierge is thrilled to see her – she’s a big fan… of SkinnyPop, that is. Distracted by the delicious snack, the young woman gets Aniston’s name repeatedly confused, until the star resigns herself to the situation and hands over some of the snacks.

The ad draws its comedy from the contrast between Aniston’s fame and her incongruous reception, and uses the product in a starring role as the driver of the joke. It’s a good way of using a brand ambassador as it puts the brand first, especially given the potential for the campaign to work over the longer term and build even greater familiarity with viewers. Aniston’s gently baffled response to the mix-up helps the ad get the right balance, too: it’s humanizing the megastar, not mocking her.

The Test Your Ad results show that audiences enjoy the approach too. The ad scores a 3.8-Star Rating on our measure predicting long-term effectiveness, a very good score that’s above the snack sector average. More impressively, the ad smashes it with Exceptional scores on short-term Spike Rating and Brand Fluency (speed and accuracy of recognition). Fluency is particularly important as that’s often where celebrity ads fall down, putting more of a spotlight on the person than the product.

Celebrities in ads aren’t a sure ticket to effectiveness. At the Super Bowl, for instance, celebrity ads score only as well on average in our Test Your Ad platform as ads with no celebrities. But what SkinnyPop are doing is a very good way to employ a celebrity – make work which can establish a long-term relationship between a brand and an individual, like George Clooney and Nespresso or Charles Barkley and CapitalOne. Will Jennifer Aniston and SkinnyPop rank alongside those successful creative platforms? Only time will tell, but this opening ad puts them on the right track.