Chew before you swallow

In an effort to tie its Tostitos tortilla chip brand to Super Bowl revelry, Frito-Lay launched "Race to the Bowl," a guerrilla campaign sporting on- and offline components.

The online "Fiesta Bowl" portion is hosted on Facebook, where rival groups — fans for the Ohio State University Buckeyes and for the University of Texas Longhorns — compete for dominance between December 31 and January 5.

The company seeded the effort on Facebook from late November, at which time it began soliciting schools that could become finalists in the Fiesta Bowl. Standard ads and engagement ads were targeted specifically to universities of interest. Once Ohio State and University of Texas were narrowed down, ads visible to other schools were removed.

As of December 31st, the Longhorn group had 239 members; the Buckeyes had 127.

Offline, two teams composed of six fans each will compete in various games across the nation, including venues like Ohio State, University of Texas and New York City. One event, for example, requires each team to visit their respective college campus and paint the faces of fellow students in the college's theme colors. This and other challenges will be conducted until game day.

A company representative said the campaign's purpose is to develop rapport with football-loving co-eds. By enabling followers of the Facebook groups to track their progress online, Frito-Lay hopes to maintain a tangible connection all the way up to the Super Bowl.

Notably, the online component for "Race to the Bowl" appears exclusively on Facebook. Unlike Super Bowl sponsors in previous years, which built destinations on proprietary URLs that coincided with their advertisements, Frito-Lay did not build a dedicated campaign site (i.e. "RacefortheBowl.com"). This strategy saves money and time that would otherwise be spent trying to draw traffic to a young, poorly indexed URL — traffic the well-indexed Facebook already possesses.

A page on Tostitos.com does contain the contest rules. But unlike the Facebook subsite, it does not appear in the first page of a Google search for "race to the bowl":