When Pringles set out to launch its new Hot Blazing Chicken flavour, the team didn’t rely on the usual glossy ad campaign. Instead, they turned to Chelsea star Cole Palmer and a social-first experiment that proved authenticity still beats ad spend.
The latest instalment in our Focus Week of in-depth coverage from Prolific North Live – headline sponsored by sponsored by Dotdigital, Slater Heelis, Buymedia and CTI Digital – hosted at UA92 in Manchester on 6 November 2025 — looks at how the snack giant’s team turned a limited budget into a viral cultural moment.
In one of the event’s standout sessions, Rebecca Worthington, Salty Snacks Marketing Lead for the UK at Kellanova, which oversees Pringles and Cheez-It, joined Nicole Sime, Digital & Social Consultant at Ear to the Ground, to reveal how their partnership with Chelsea star and Manchester lad Cole Palmer became one of the year’s most talked-about campaigns.
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The Hot vs Cole campaign promoted the Pringles Hot range and generated 53 million impressions and a media value of £1.2m, outperforming what a traditional three-week out-of-home campaign could have delivered. It also boosted Pringles Hot sales by 25% year-on-year and lifted brand penetration by 1%, proving that authenticity can drive measurable ROI.
Originally, the brand had planned a short OOH burst to promote the spicy range, but as Worthington explained, that approach didn’t suit the younger audience they were trying to reach. “Yes, great reach,” she said, “but if you think about the audience, they would walk past it or scroll past it. It had no engagement or conversation element.”
Instead, Pringles decided to take a risk. They already had the idea of “hot versus cold” running through their creative, and when Palmer’s understated, “cold” persona started breaking out beyond football fandom, the team saw an opportunity. “People loved him both on and off the field,” Worthington said. “They were doing his celebration at home, sharing his interviews, and even people who weren’t football fans were interested in him. And importantly, he loved Pringles. If you’ve ever used talent who doesn’t, it’s so obvious.”
Working with Ear to the Ground, they built a social-first campaign around unscripted moments rather than a polished shoot. “We knew if he just stood there saying, ‘Come on, my Pringles Hot today,’ it wouldn’t work,” Worthington said. “We had to be more authentic, not scripted.”
The team created a video series testing whether Palmer could “handle the heat” – sitting in a sauna answering questions, taking a blind taste test, and facing a lie detector with his sister. The content was deliberately unpolished and personality-driven, leaning into Palmer’s deadpan humour.
“It’s a difficult line with comedy once you’ve watched something 50 times,” said Sime. “We focused on laughing with Cole, not at him, and creating space for him to be himself. We were taking risks together, but the higher the risk, the higher the reward.”
That approach extended into post-production. “All the text was platform-native,” Sime explained. “If you use brand fonts, people sniff out the ad and scroll. We used Instagram fonts, Pringles colours, and made sure Cole’s face was front and centre in the first second. It felt natural in-feed.”
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The gamble paid off. Palmer’s offhand comment that he had “never had a meal deal” and preferred “jam sandwiches” went viral, picked up on BBC Radio 1 and across the national press. Crucially, almost every piece of coverage included images of him holding a Pringles can and linking back to the videos.
Worthington said the results spoke for themselves: “We probably would have achieved around 200,000 paid media impressions with the original plan. Instead, we generated 53 million and a media value of £1.2m. It was the best-performing Pringles post we’ve ever done.”
The brand then carried the success through to retail, with Tesco and Asda running in-store activations tied to the campaign. “If people had seen the social content, it reminded them in-store and drove that point of purchase,” Worthington said. “It wasn’t just a social moment – it translated into tangible sales.”
Four in five people who saw the content said they were more interested in Pringles, while 63% said they were more likely to buy. The brand has since built on the partnership with a second Halloween-themed campaign, featuring glow-in-the-dark Pringles tubes, which has already clocked more than 10 million views.
Reflecting on the results, Worthington said the key to success was trust — both in the audience and the talent. “We chose a personality our audience over-indexes with, leaned into his authentic style, and saw it through the line with real sales results,” she said.
Sime agreed. “You can’t engineer a viral moment,” she said. “But you can create an environment where they happen. That’s what we did and it worked.”