Bacon sales grew 5.4% while the category fell 4.2%. Because we built a dating app.
Challenge
People love bacon, but at the shelf there is no brand loyalty. Oscar Mayer won double-blind taste tests and still lost the buying decision. The category had become a commodity knife fight where private label was winning on price and every brand sounded the same.
Insight
Bacon love isn't a preference. It's an identity. People declared it in dating profiles, Twitter bios, and tattoo parlors. If bacon love was already part of how people found each other, a bacon brand could play matchmaker.
Idea
Sizzl: the world’s first real dating app for bacon lovers. Real profiles, real matches, and a Sizzl meter that measured your passion with every swipe.
Execution
Sizzl launched as a fully functioning dating app, engineered for love and for earned media. Press and social were not the amplification layer — they were the media plan.
Every detail, from the name to the Sizzl meter, was designed to be quoted and shared. The idea only works if you genuinely build it, so we built it.
The numbers
Bacon sales growth during the campaign, while the category itself fell 4.2%.
Earned media impressions, with brand conversation up 644%.
Media stories in the first week alone, from Time and NPR to Fortune, TechCrunch, and Late Night with Seth Meyers.
Cannes Lions honors, including Silver for Mobile Apps, plus two One Show Pencils. 54K downloads of a bacon brand's dating app.
Stories without strategy are entertainment.
Sizzl became a blueprint I have carried into every role since. It started with a true client partnership, a brilliant insight, and one of the most creative teams I have ever worked with. It only works when you define what winning looks like before building anything.
Creative direction by David Yankelewitz with Aaron Mosher. Written by Shloimy Notik, Heather English, and Paul Elicker. Art direction by Chad O’Connell. Design by Peter Chang and Yossi Belkin. Launch film directed by Terri Timely.
Building a marketing organization from nothing
Culture into commerce.