Pop-Tarts, Cheez-It, and Snoop Dogg Keep It Weird During College Bowl Season

For brands sponsoring college bowl games, it’s no longer enough to turn your cheese cracker into a mascot or burn your toaster-pastry mascot alive and have teams eat it in front of fans: You need to be the Snoop Dogg of postseason play.

There are 47 bowl games that comprise college football bowl season in 2024-25. That’s up from 39 at the end of the 2014-15 college football season and just 28 two decades ago. For companies attaching their brands to these postseason experiences, there’s considerable incentive to get a little weird with their sports marketing and separate themselves from the pack.

“It became more challenging to drum up excitement or get the commitment as more bowl games were created,” said Bob Lynch, founder and CEO of SponsorUnited. “It creates this glut of inventory that makes it so much harder.”

But still effective: According to television data firm EDO, all college bowl games last year were an average of 33% more effective in connecting consumers with ads than overall primetime programming. And when Kellanova’s team at Pop-Tarts dropped their edible mascot into a giant toaster on Dec. 28 in Orlando, Fla., last year, Pop-Tarts ads aired during that game cooked their primetime counterparts by more than 1,800%.

By New Year’s Day at Orlando’s Cheez-It Citrus Bowl, the Pop-Tart stunt had gained so much traction that Cheez-It mascot Ched-Z emerged from a giant on-field box toting a sign reading “NON-EDIBLE MASCOT.” As a result, the bowl’s ads outperformed primetime by 52%, with Cheez-It’s own promotions getting a 258% boost.

But brands can’t simply run the same play again during the next year’s bowls. Pop-Tarts is adding more edible mascots, while Cheez-It surrounds Ched-Z with Love Island stars and two-minute weddings.

The Arizona Bowl, which saw its ad effectiveness nearly double in primetime on Dec. 30 last year at the end of a three-year sponsorship with Barstool Sports, handed its event to Snoop Dogg for the next three years and dubbed itself the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl presented by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop.

Even a longtime NCAA sponsor like Great Clips has to adapt when the College Football Playoff—which it signed on to sponsor last year—goes through massive changes. The playoff ended the four-team format it used from 2014 through 2023 and embraced a 12-team structure with four first-round matchups, six quarterfinal and semifinal games hosted by the New Year’s Six bowls (Fiesta, Sugar, Rose, Cotton, Peach, and Orange), and the championship game—pushing Great Clips into a more extensive campaign featuring announcer Jesse Palmer and college players on name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals. 

In a crowded field of bowl competitors, brands and bowls that stay nimble and weird avoid watching their competitors race by from the sidelines and taking a tough loss.

“Brands want to tell a story. They want to do more than just slap their name and logo onto the event. They want to create content around it,” Lynch said. “That’s pushed the bowl operators to get more creative, and once you started to see some of these activations take place—like the mayo being dumped on people—this stuff’s going viral, and it’s really interesting and differentiates us. Ask, ‘How can a brand make us more relevant and tell a story around the bowl?’”

Defending the title

Since the Frosted Strawberry Pop-Tarts mascot met its toasty demise at last year’s Pop-Tarts Bowl, its kin has appeared on the red carpet with Jerry Seinfeld at the premiere of Netflix’s Pop-Tart biopic, Unfrosted; Pop-Tarts has become an in-demand Halloween costume; and the pastries are emerging in greater numbers for this year’s bowl.

Kellanova announced earlier this year that Frosted Wild Berry and Frost Hot Fudge Sundae mascots would appear at the next Pop-Tarts Bowl, but they kept teasing a “mystery flavor” until revealing Frosted Cinnamon Roll’s identity on Today in early December. The slow reveal—and the eventual fan vote for the Pop-Tarts Bowl’s inevitably toasted mascot MVP—maintained steady interest among social media and entertainment press alike.

“Whether you’re a fan of football or not, the edible mascots will spark conversations, meme-worthy moments, and interactive engagement,” said Heidi Ray, Kellanova’s senior director of brand marketing for Pop-Tarts. “It’s an inclusive, high-energy experience that brings fans into the heart of the action.”

The Cheez-It Citrus Bowl, meanwhile, has thrown on-field hotel rooms and Cheez-It-branded haircuts from sideline barber shops at fans for years. After last year’s mascot faceoff, however, Cheez-It added Love Island star Kordell Beckham to its gameday roster as “Chief Fantazeez Officer (CFO)” and having him on hand to help fans live out “Football Fantazeez,” including a two-minute timeout wedding officiated by Ched-Z, a stint as a sportscaster reporting from a studio in the world’s largest bowl of Cheez-Its, and an up-close witness to a Ched-Z field-goal attempt.

That escalation—and a game day menu at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium that includes a “Spicy Cheez-It Bird Dog,” “Loaded Cheez-It Brisket Potato Skins,” and a “Cheez-It Pimento Cheez & Bacon Burger”—confirms the essential role weirdness plays in Kellanova’s college-bowl game plan.

 “College football fans, particularly those steeped in meme culture and humor shaped by cultural platforms, respond to campaigns that feel as unpredictable and lively as their own tailgate traditions,” said Cara Tragseiler, Kellanova senior brand director for Cheez-It. “Embracing ‘weird’ is not just valuable—it’s vital for connecting with our audience.”

 With Pop-Tarts still touting its “crazy good” tagline and pairing last year’s bowl success into an integrated partnership with Netflix, its marketing team acknowledges that there’s some weirdness to the brand’s campaign—but it takes just the right recipe to make “weird” work.

“Maintaining that balance of fun and cultural relevance is part of our mission,” Ray said. “We’re not just trying to be unconventional for the sake of it—we’re creating memorable experiences that leave fans saying, ‘I can’t believe they did that!’”

Snoop-er Bowl

Eric Rhodes, the Arizona Bowl’s vice president of communications, answers the phone, “Hey, this is Eric Rhodes from the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop”—not out of obligation or awe at having a globally recognized figure associated with his game, but knowing the work Snoop Dogg’s name and brand is doing in that title.

The Arizona Bowl is wrapping up its first decade of existence and, during that time, it has donated 100% of its net proceeds to charitable organizations in and around its host city of Tucson. It has the second-largest economic impact of any event in Tucson—behind only the city’s gem and mineral show, the world’s largest—and it has contributed to more than 70 charities throughout southern Arizona. Last year, 15 groups relied on the revenue the bowl created from ticket and concession sales.

That fundraising goal made innovation and publicity essential throughout the bowl’s existence. In 2015, before non-linear broadcast was much of a consideration for bowl games, the Arizona Bowl announced that it was going to focus on digital distribution and stream its debut game on the now-defunct Campus Insiders. With help from sports media, marketing, and technology company Playfly, the bowl drew Barstool Sports as a sponsor in 2021 and retained its investment despite having to scrap that year’s installment when Boise State’s team contracted Covid-19.

At the end of Barstool’s term in 2023, Playfly floated Snoop Dogg and his Gin & Juice brand as a bowl sponsor. Gin & Juice put together partnerships with World Wrestling Entertainment, Major League Baseball’s New York Mets and Yankees, and Liverpool FC’s Virgil van Dijk, but this one would make it the first alcohol sponsor for a bowl game and make Snoop Dogg the bowl’s name sponsor, as Jimmy Kimmel and Rob Gronkowski had been for the L.A. Bowl. 

Snoop Dogg brought Master P and members of his Snoop Youth Football League—which helped produce reigning National Football League Offensive Rookie of the Year C.J. Stroud—to last year’s Arizona Bowl and sat them among the more than 30,000 people in attendance. The Arizona Bowl and Playfly, meanwhile, pitched a Snoop-forward approach to the Gin & Juice sponsorship to the bowl’s partners in the Mountain West and Mid-American conferences and school presidents and boards.

Considering the popularity of Snoop from recent stints as a judge on The Voice and Olympic Games announcer and torchbearer, the Arizona Bowl and its partners at Playfly channeled Arizona Diamondbacks president and CEO Derrick Hall’s find-a-way-to-say-yes (FAWTSY) customer service policy and convinced partners to buy in.

“We’re not going to just bring in a brand that devalues those conferences and devalues those teams—we want to do it with the right partner,” said Jesse Hendershot, senior director of corporate partnerships at Playfly. “It really, really helped with Snoop being the face of it, coming along for the ride and not just slapping his name on there.”

Snoop will be on the ground in Tucson, meeting with youth players, participating teams, and coaches. While the bowl wouldn’t say exactly how he’d be taking part in promotions or activations at Arizona Stadium, they noted that he’d be popping into the announcers’ booth with veteran sportscaster Thom Brennaman to call parts of the game during The CW’s broadcast.

“When you hear about all the 40-plus bowl games, they all do a phenomenal job, but there are certainly ones that pique interest around the nation,” Rhodes said. “Whether you’re from even the West side of our country or not, we believe people have at least heard of the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl now.”

A cut above

Great Clips became the official hair salon of the NCAA in 2020 but jumped aboard for the College Football Playoff just last year. And now, college football’s entire game has changed.

Even before the expanded format, the CFP was a heavy hitter among advertisers. Ads aired during last year’s Rose Bowl semifinal were 103% more effective than the primetime average, according to EDO. To give that some perspective, brands would have to air roughly 108 ads across your average primetime TV slate to generate the same engagement as one Rose Bowl ad.

And that was the least-popular CFP offering. The Sugar Bowl’s ads were 120% more effective than the primetime average. Meanwhile, consumers were 101% more likely to engage with ads during the national championship game—an 18% increase in performance from a year earlier.

Now with the entire New Year’s Six sucked into the CFP—and last year’s NY6 ads about 50% more effective than average primetime—longtime advertisers like Great Clips need to spread the ball around a bit. With help from Disney Advertising, Great Clips brought in ESPN analyst and former quarterback and Bachelor Jesse Palmer—along with influencer Natalie Rose—for a spot kicking off its new multiyear relationship with the CFP.

The national ad is just part of a strategy that includes social spots with NIL partners, including University of Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel, Notre Dame quarterback Riley Leonard, University of Miami kicker Andres Borregales, and podcast hosts, dancers, equipment managers, drum majors, and fan influencers. With 4,400 locations in North America run by 700 franchisees, Great Clips has also used the CFP’s expanded format to highlight its local strengths—like getting Atlanta locations and stylists ready for the national title game.

“There’s just so much energy and excitement around this, because it is so new, with the 12-team playoff format, and there’s just so many unknowns,” said Lisa Hake, vp of marketing and communications at Great Clips. “It’s just been exciting working with the partners—whether it’s Jesse Palmer or Dillon Gabriel or the influencers, they’re inside our salons, they’re seeing the real experience, and experiencing it themselves, and I think that has helped bring it to life quickly.”