Top 5 food and beverage marketing ideas you need to know about now

Ad Age expanded its "Creativity Top 5" series to include new roundups of our favorite special-interest campaigns and ideas from brands. This week we look at some new ideas, and creative solutions, from food and beverage brands. Visit our site each Thursday for a new ranking of campaigns from the past month. 

A hot dog-flavored popsicle? Gross. But also attention-getting. And in the case of this Oscar Mayer creation, fan-inspired. The frozen treat (and we use the word "treat" loosely) is made of flavored frozen gelato, described as capturing an Oscar Mayer dog’s smokey, umami notes with a swirl of mustard. The idea came from Oscar Mayer agency Johannes Leonardo and was sparked by the brand polling fans on product ideas.The “Cold Dog” was sold for $2 at select locations of frozen desserts company Popbar in Long Beach, New York, Atlanta and New Orleans. The perfect topping? Too bad this French’s mustard ice cream is not still around.

Here’s more evidence that the QR code is alive and well: Subway used one as part of a campaign that asked people in London to scan a code on a giant billboard at the Westfield Stratford shopping mall that then allowed them to control the screen and add ingredients to build their ideal sandwich. Interesting, but not very useful without a real-life component—which Subway added by having employees find people interacting with the billboard and giving them actual sandwiches.

This billboard might be a tad more practical (and environmental) than Subway’s stunt—it keeps beer cold. The beer brand installed it at the Brazil's "Rock in Rio" festival. Equipped with solar panels, it is connected to Brewteco, a famous bar in Rio. "This billboard is cooling your Heineken. Cheers," it states. Publicis Le Pub Brasil is behind the effort.

Why mess with a good thing? Wendy’s didn’t, bringing back its collaboration with the Adult Swim show in time for the Sept. 6 premiere of the sixth season. The newest effort is a tad meta—an ad shows a Wendy’s character disguised as Rick fooling Morty into dressing up as French toast sticks, a new Wendy’s breakfast item.

“I think that an important part of this relationship was that we want to make sure that everything we're doing is as authentic as possible and it is staying true to the vision, to the perspective, to the tonality of what the show is about,” Jimmy Bennett, Wendy’s VP of media and social, told Ad Age. 

Plenty of brands try to own phrases. But shapes? Doritos wants to be synonymous with triangles—all of them, all over the world. In an effort unleashed late last month from Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the PepsiCo brand deployed the Triangle Tracker, a Snapchat AR lens that directed people to point their phone at any triangle in the real world, with machine learning technology turning it into a Doritos chip. The payback? Snapchat generated codes for a website to unlock rewards with a top prize of $250,000.

The brand did not stop there. Rapper Offset plugged the Triangle Tracker at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards. An ongoing TikTok challenge asks people to find "the biggest, most creative, and coolest triangles in the world.” And outdoor ads included Doritos transforming three triangular buildings in the U.S. into Doritos chips.

But wait, there’s more: Doritos invaded Fortnite with a "Doritos Triangle Island" in the game's Creative mode.

Talk about a 360-degree campaign. Or maybe we should say 180-degree.