Jell-O: Viral Content Marketing
The challenge: Make Jell-O cool again. The solution? A 12-second TikTok that resonated with hundreds of thousands of people.
What’s Jell-O?
You don’t know what Jell-O is?! Just kidding. Jell-O is an American gelatin dessert company that sells powdered gelatin, pudding, no-bake cream pie mixes and more.
The Challenge
Jell-O is an iconic brand. But after a recent brand refresh, Jell-O had gone completely dormant on social media and was quickly slipping out of relevance. Jell-O needed a way to connect with the generation that could make it cool again — Gen Z.
The Process
To figure out how to connect with Gen-Z on TikTok, I brainstormed different ideas that would pair Jell-O with something Gen-Z cared about. I tried tapping into nostalgia with a Jell-O cup stacking video and tried to joke about famous singer-songwriter Hozier releasing a new song about Jell-O, but these didn’t make it past my inner circle of friends and followers.
Then, I thought of pairing Jell-O with the mega-popular game New York Times Connections. I made a quick, 12-second-long video pretending that today’s Connections was all Jell-O, and minutes after posting it — the video started to blow up.
The Solution
By cleverly creating pairing Jell-O with Connections, I created an entertaining TikTok that sneakily reminded Gen Z of a classic favourite snack. It wasn’t an ad, but a conversation starter. Multiple comments said they assumed the TikTok was posted by the official Jell-O account and that they thought it would make a great organic or paid post.
The Results
The video didn’t just perform well — it exploded. In one month, it racked up over 3 million views, 334K likes, 9,000 saves, and 22,000 shares. The comment section became filled with users tagging their friends and making jokes about Jell-O. Most importantly, it hit exactly the right audience: 68% of viewers were 18-24, and another 23% were 25-34, proving that Jell-O was officially back on Gen Z’s radar.
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