Ritz Crisp & Thin is the love child of last gen’s favourite Ritz cracker and the new gen flavoured potato crisp. It’s baked not fried like its new gen market-mates and comes in the four trending-right-now flavours, Cream Cheese & Onion, Sea Salt & Vinegar, Sweet Red Chilli and Sea Salt & Black Pepper.
Parent, Mondelez, is hoping to grab a significant chunk of the European savoury snack market where the prize pool is £2.3bn (that’s 100 packets of crisps eaten per person per year) and currently dominated by the potato crisp. “…we believe there is significant room for snacks to be bigger within the category, like in North America where salty snacks are worth $28bn. This is the first launch of many geared up to explode savoury snacks in the UK,” Rick Lawrence, biscuits, crisps and snacks category lead UK&I at Mondelēz International, stated.
And Mother intends to ‘explode savoury snacks in the UK’ by making them attractive to younger ‘foodies who snack’. Ritz has sprung off the starting block with a 93% brand awareness in its engine and £10m over 7 months to fuel its run.
The Ritz Crisp & Thin launch team, made up of Mondeléz International, Mother, PHD, Hill+Knowlton Strategies, Gravity Road and Hey Human developed the concept, Putting on the Ritz – the idea being that Ritz Crisp & Thin transforms every day snacking moments, into something that’s ritzy.
Mother’s TVC, directed by Fredrik Bond and shot in Lisbon, gets its pizzazz from the Irving Berlin classic, Puttin’ on the Ritz, which has been re-recorded by Grammy award winning American jazz musician, Gregory Porter.
Gregory Porter will also be releasing a single of his remake of Puttin on the Ritz, which will be available to download from iTunes. He has also created a music video with Mothe, to support his track. The video will be promoted by Porter’s music label, Universal, via Vevo and Gregory’s own social channels.
The campaign will be supported by a £10m marketing campaign over the next seven months and covers TV advertising, OOH, digital, sampling, in-store activity and PR.
Mother’s OOH ads were shot by photographer, Carl Klein, and will appear on roadside and digital six sheets across 3,500 sites nationally.
