Hard-core Green Bay Packers fans—the ones wearing foam blocks of cheddar as hats—would not consider showing up on game day with a plant-based cheese pizza as a snack.
That party foul could result in “unhappy townspeople wielding pitchforks,” according to a focus group member who went medieval in his opinion of cheese alternatives.
But moments earlier, unbeknownst to this hater, he had been chowing down on the very object of his derision—and he even went back for seconds. So much for his discerning palate.
Daiya, a leader in the plant-based cheese category, gathered three different groups of “pizza experts” for a Q&A, preceded by a buffet of the brand’s piping hot pizza slices. Everybody ate, nobody complained and yet the barbs flew as soon as an interviewer started the session.
Five adorable children promised they’d never eat plant-based pizza because “it would taste disgusting,” according to one kid, as another fake puked. And in a group of pizza deliverers, one man said, “I don’t see a future in plant-based pizza” because discerning foodies “really couldn’t even consider it a pizza.”
The campaign, under the umbrella heading “Skeptics,” leans into a tactic that Daiya has used successfully before. The brand, via its longtime agency of record TDA Boulder, again confronts criticism of a category that has traditionally struggled in its flavor and texture profiles.
The goal was to “get unknowing approval from pizza and cheese experts and show the bias head on,” Jonathan Schoenberg, the agency’s executive creative director and partner, told Adweek. “The brief was, how do we speak to our skeptics, because we have a lot of them.”
“Skeptics” also revisits a well-worn trope in advertising: embracing negative reviews to show the brand’s sense of humor, pulling a swap on consumers and then providing testimonials to bolster the product.
