Walkers Feel The Love With Another Classic Crisp Ad

Think of Walkers ads and you probably think of Gary Lineker – one of the all-time great celebrity campaigns, and a sequence of classic ads. But here’s something you may not be aware of. 4 of the top 5 snack ads on Test Your Ad are for Walkers Crisps (the fifth is for sister brand Doritos) and they’re all from the last three years. After some initial tries at replicating the Lineker magic with other celebrities, Walkers and agency VCCP have found their own striking form and are producing ads which audiences love just as much, helping the brand maintain its market dominance.

The latest Walkers and VCCP commercial, “We love potatoes, so you can love Walkers”, returns to a theme the brand have explored in the last couple of years – how much Britain loves the brand and the various eccentric ways people eat their crisps. It’s a theme which drove the highly successful #crispinorcrispout campaign last year, which led to highly entertaining ads and a high level of social engagement. Now the brand uses the tagline to put its own spin on a classic food advertising trope, the provenance ad.

It’s common for food and food retail brands to stress provenance in ads – showing farmers and suppliers, emphasising the British or local sources for ingredients, and pulling back the curtain a little on supply chains. It’s a great opportunity for brands to underline their sustainability or ethical credentials. It can be a little dry, but recently we’ve seen brands like Morrisons and M&S find really creative, entertaining ways to make their provenance points.

Now it’s Walkers turn, with a tongue-in-cheek ad featuring four real potato farmers who grow spuds for Walkers crisps. With Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s kitschy 80s classic “The Power Of Love” on the soundtrack, the ad casts the farmers’ love of potatoes as a kind of romantic devotion, with slow-motion footage of one saving a single potato when it falls off the back of a truck. By contrast, the ad ends with customers gleefully munching and crunching the crisps those potatoes make.

The ad gets a very strong 4.7-Star rating for long-term effectiveness, and Exceptional scores for both short-term Spike and Brand Fluency. It ends up as one of those Top 5 snack ads, proving that “Britain’s Most Loved Crisps” are still more than capable of making some of Britain’s most loved ads.