IYKYK—in 2025, Gen Z-ers camped out in private DMs. In response to this behavior shift, we spotted an opportunity hiding in plain sight: If teens were trading inside jokes in their group chats instead of posting publicly, what if a brand could create an inside joke so good it demanded to be shared? Challenge accepted. We needed to crack the code on arcane teen culture and engineer content that felt authentically native to their DMs, not like an ad trying to infiltrate their conversations. For Fruit by the Foot, that meant tapping into something teens already knew and loved, then making it unmistakably ours.
Our mission was to create content that Gen Z audiences didn’t just engage with, but couldn’t resist sharing. The goal was to increase engagement by driving social shares at scale, transforming Fruit by the Foot from a familiar snack brand into a bona fide cultural player in the daily digital lives of today’s teens. Success would be measured not just by views or likes, but by shares, the undisputed currency of relevance in Gen Z’s private-message-first world. We needed to engineer virality that exploded organically the group chat, not the feeds they scrolled past.
Fruit by the Foot is a snack that’s meant to be played with (it’s in the product’s DNA). So, we asked: How do we create content that is just as playable (and shareable) as the snack?
Enter “The Game,” a relentless, maddening mental challenge worshipped by teen pranksters, where the only rule of “The Game” is not to think about “The Game.” It’s the ultimate inside joke: deliciously annoying, ruthlessly addictive, and infinitely shareable. By commandeering “The Game” and making it unmistakably Fruit by the Foot’s, we could turn a participatory prank into a branded moment.
The Creative Idea: Pranking With Product
But Fruit by the Foot couldn’t just play the game. To outsmart our hyper-savvy teen audience, we needed ownability. The unlock? Leveraging the product’s most unique and recognizable attribute: its ridiculous, endlessly unspooling length. We created the “Pull Me” prank: content that seduced viewers into interacting, only to reveal they’d just lost “The Game.” The caption? “Absolutely diabolical.” Teens ate it up and immediately shared it with friends to make them lose, too.
The Execution: Catching Them Again (And Again)
The "Pull Me" prank worked. 11.2 million people fell for it organically, and they shared it over 128 million times. But we knew one prank wouldn’t cut it. To keep teens perpetually paranoid, we invented new ways to catch them, using wildly unpredictable hooks in deceptively innocuous settings. From a simple game of catch to engagement-baiting audio cues, each iteration ensured they never had a chance of keeping the prank fresh and the shares flowing for over six months.
The Result: An Inside Joke Worth Sharing
The result? We unlocked an irresistible, unmistakably ours product-led inside joke on social that teens desperately wanted to share, not because a brand told them to, but because pranking their friends was too delicious to resist. The campaign racked up more than 111 million organic impressions, 377 million shares across social channels, proving that when you crack teen culture on their terms, they’ll do the marketing for you. Our engagement rate grew by more than 400% year-over-year, cementing Fruit by the Foot as a brand that doesn’t just understand Gen Z; it plays their game as well as they do.
And by the way: We’re sorry, but you just lost the game.