RITZ Crackers started 2023 with the goals of modernizing the brand and increasing its cultural relevance on social media. We still planned to leverage the cracker’s iconic visual assets (its golden color and familiar round shape), but it had to be in a social-first way that genuinely engaged and delighted fans. It had to stop people in their scroll and make it fun for them to reply.
Fast forward three months, and RITZ had started the largest brand Twitter trend of 2023 with one simple CTA to reply with an open hand emoji.
“Reply with a 🫴” came to life as a single 40-character tweet, but it was the result of months of revamping our social approach. We knew that followers were scrolling past polished product images and ignoring saccharine snacking sentiments, and it was time to get scrappier. Enter: the yellow circle 🟡 emoji.
After several weeks of testing and learning, we saw that tweets using ask-and-receive CTAs with the yellow circle emoji were typically receiving 3-4x more engagement than any of our other tweets. This format seemed to naturally produce a “talk with me and I’ll talk with you” feeling between the brand and our fans, and, true to our strategy shift, it was a much more casual way for RITZ to digitally place its crackers in fans’ hands (and heads) in an instant. It also became the catalyst for a hugely viral moment that completely took over Twitter.
For nearly a week following RITZ’s tweet, we weren’t just joining in on online culture like we had set out to do – we were actively helping to create that culture. Our idea instantaneously morphed from single tweet to viral trend, and the results made it clear that we had started an online phenomenon:
1,000+ brands and celebrities joined the "reply with a 🫴'' trend including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Wikipedia, Hulu, Disney, Sony, NBC, Oprah Winfrey Network, Adweek, TikTok, Reddit, Spotify, Xbox, LEGO, SEGA, Pittsburgh Steelers, Chicago Cubs, US Open Tennis, Crocs, Verizon, AT&T, Walmart, Pepsi, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Burger King, Chili's, Crumbl Cookies, Starbucks, Dunkin' and more. Every single industry showed up to engage with their followers using a simple emoji, whether that was to announce a product promotion or donate money for a cause.
Even more exciting to both the agency and brand teams, RITZ’s original tweet organically garnered 1.3M+ impressions and placed us in front of a larger audience than the brand had ever seen on the platform. Fans were engaging with our tweet at a 10x higher rate than our year-to-date Twitter average, and we quickly gained 5K+ new followers. Inspiring a collective disruption of regularly scheduled programming on Twitter, “reply with a 🫴'' received attention from popular marketing newsletters, was meme-orialized in Nathan Allebach’s famous master document of every Twitter meme to exist, and permanently associated RITZ with the 🟡 emoji.
