RITZ Crackers had seen success with millennial fans on social media but hadn’t quite grabbed Gen Z’s attention in a big way. We knew younger fans loved eating RITZ too, and we needed to boost our online relevance with them by speaking their language.
Social listening quickly helped us discover a valuable insight: our brand name was only one letter away from “rizz,” and Gen Z was talking about it. And we activated on this immediately. Months before Oxford Dictionary crowned “rizz” as its 2023 Word of the Year, RIZZ Crackers entered fans’ feeds and became an overnight viral success.
“RITZ” and “rizz” comparisons were multiplying by the day and presented a huge opportunity to break through to Gen Z. The ball was in our court to either shelf this insight (that might not totally resonate with our established following) or to embrace it and go big. We chose the latter.
Our RIZZ Crackers “rebrand” would first be revealed on April Fool’s Day to help maximize potential reach and engagement. At this point, fans were explicitly telling us they expected to see our take on rizz, and the more visibility we could get on this activation, the better.
With an idea rooted in one of our strongest fan insights in recent memory, one challenge was to determine which of RITZ’s channels would make the most sense to house RIZZ Crackers. TikTok seemed like a natural fit, but our Instagram audience skewed a bit older. Would they even care about this new Gen Z slang? Would it fall completely flat? Could it be shareable enough to actually bring more eyeballs to our Instagram? Ultimately, both the agency and brand teams decided that our original insights were strong enough to post RIZZ Crackers across all of our channels, and we began crafting a series of posts.
A mix of video and static content featured a fake RIZZ Crackers box that looked realistic enough to produce a flood of comments asking to make it a real product. Other than the box, we kept the assets and copy fairly simple – we wanted to make a bold visual statement that we were a brand with (unspoken) rizz.
Once our first posts went live, new followers flooded in to react, and RITZ’s day one fans fully embraced a playful new way to talk about one of their favorite snacks.
The rizz-ults made it clear that we had tapped into something big. RIZZ Crackers produced multiple viral moments after one week and increased RITZ's TikTok following by 27.4% in less than three weeks. Shattering our goals for this activation, we had shifted the brand's TikTok presence to be solidly Gen Z and later took the number one spot in the Q3 Ad Age-Harris Poll as the brand that earned the biggest gains among Gen Z consumers.
In April 2023 alone, our RIZZ Crackers content organically garnered:
Fans also flooded our comment sections with shocked excitement for RIZZ Crackers. Their feedback confirmed that we had succeeded in genuinely entertaining them by making RITZ synonymous with the newest trending word taking over their feeds:
@jaxsonwoolhiser - “W ritz”
@elda_loves_garfield - “I THOUGHT IT WAS ALWAYS RIZZ”
@trans_len_kagamine - “HOW DO FOOD COMPANIES HAVE THE BEST HUMOR-”
@janaylovesu - “IS THIS REAL?? IF YES IM GETTIN SOME”
@lilith.thevampire - “Ritz has infinite rizz”
@azazeltboimain - “WHAT HAPPENED TO THEIR NAME I SWEAR IT WAS RITZ”
@axel_vsp_ - “Nah cause how I got rizzed by this was crazy”
@mnmtwinz - “This genuinely made me laugh out loud. 😂😂😂”
@DymondR22 - “ACTIVATED UNGODLY RIZZ”
