How Tostitos and Amazon Ads cooked up a delicious shoppable campaign with America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation
May 03, 2023 | By Elena Tesser, Product Marketing Manager
The holidays are a time for feeling joy, being with loved ones, and eating lots of food—sometimes more than families can finish in one sitting. And for days after a big festive dinner, there may be leftovers stuck languishing in the fridge. For the 2022 holiday season, Tostitos set out to solve this dilemma by reimagining their beloved tortilla chips as the key ingredient to transform these leftovers. “We know that after the holidays, consumers are inundated with leftovers, but may not want to eat the same meal for days on end,” said Jenni Welsh, senior marketing director at Tostitos. “With that in mind, Tostitos wanted to help consumers reimagine what their leftovers could be.”
To spread the word to festive foodies that “next-day delicious” was just a crunch away, Tostitos collaborated with Amazon Ads for a first-of-its-kind, content-to-commerce custom activation. The collaboration was anchored in the new Amazon Freevee reality cooking competition series, America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation, which followed 11 contestants/home cooks as they presented their dishes throughout a series of challenges that tested their culinary abilities and on-camera personalities. The last cook standing would win the job of a lifetime—becoming the newest face of America’s Test Kitchen, the opportunity to write their own cookbook, and a $100,000 prize to fund the culinary business of their dreams. The campaign extended across multiple Amazon touchpoints, showcasing a creative recipe starring holiday leftovers and Tostitos while seamlessly driving the full-funnel customer experience from streaming to purchase.
From the start, the collaboration came together as seamlessly as chips and queso. “In bringing this campaign to life, it was important to the Tostitos brand that the execution was seasonally relevant, solved a real problem for consumers, and leveraged the brand in an authentic and credible way,” Welsh said. By aligning with Freevee’s America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation, Tostitos was able to tell their story organically, while making it easy for viewers to also shop the product in the Amazon store.
Madeline Langlieb, executive producer of America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation, acknowledged how this seamless fit between the show and the brand also helped enhance the experience for viewers. “America’s Test Kitchen’s singular goal is to empower home cooks in the kitchen,” Langlieb said. “By working with Amazon Ads and Tostitos, we were able to deliver on that.”
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Enabling audiences to shop Tostitos across multiple Amazon touchpoints
From the beginning, the main priority for Tostitos and Amazon Ads was to provide customers with an innovative, enjoyable viewing experience that would inspire product discovery and purchase. “We built a fully integrated campaign with Amazon Ads to inspire consumers with new recipe ideas during the holidays, [leveraging] Amazon touchpoints to create a seamless experience for consumers,” Welsh said. “We wanted to connect the dots from upper-funnel awareness media to lower-funnel tactics.”
The campaign came to life through a unique collaboration across Amazon Freevee, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Live, and Fire TV. The customer journey began when viewers streamed the premiere of America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation on December 9. During the first four episodes of the show, fans were treated to a limited commercial interruption viewing experience presented by Tostitos, reducing the ad load of each episode by up to 50%.
Then, during those shortened commercial breaks, audiences saw a custom-produced vignette featuring the show’s judges, Julia Collin Davison and Dan Souza, teasing an original recipe, using Tostitos to transform leftover turkey into spicy turkey nachos. An interactive video ad overlay drove to an Amazon Fresh custom landing page where fans could check out the full recipe and buy Tostitos chips. The spot was also promoted across all series and Amazon Freevee social handles.
Additionally, the campaign featured rewarded ads, display ads that offer viewers Amazon credit in exchange for watching content. The ads ran across Fire TV via Feature Rotator, inline banners, and screen savers, encouraging viewers to watch the vignette and earn Amazon credit. Viewers who clicked the ad were taken to a custom Fire TV landing page where they would watch the video and, once complete, have an Amazon store credit for select Tostitos products allocated to their Fire TV account or sent to their associated email address.
Lastly, fans hungry for more could tune in for a special Amazon Live “companion” at-home cooking show featuring additional Tostitos recipes with America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation callouts. Audiences could also shop Tostitos products as they watched.
The campaign was a delicious success for Tostitos. According to a Kantar brand lift study conducted for the campaign, Tostitos Fire TV ads contributed to a 14% lift in awareness, while their Amazon Streaming TV ads contributed to a 12% lift in awareness.1 Meanwhile, the campaign also contributed to lower-funnel impact, with 54% of Tostitos sales in the Amazon store during the campaign coming from new-to-brand purchasers.2
The Amazon Ads team is looking forward to bringing even more strategic cross-Amazon packages to advertisers. Edwina Cumberbatch, a senior manager for branded content at Amazon Ads, said, “In 2023, we’re excited to get creative and build more programs like this one that bring together our Amazon-owned properties and assets to help drive impact for advertisers.”
Fans can check out the Tostitos original recipe on Amazon Fresh here, and tune in to America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation, streaming now on Amazon Freevee.
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1 Kantar brand lift study, January 2023; in-field December 5– 31, 2022, US, relevance n=495, 18-34 purchase intent and agree with brand message n=43, Fire TV drove ad awareness n=54. Results are representative of performance of one advertiser are not typical and are not indicative of future performance.
2 Amazon internal data, US, 2022