We've already seen Newcastle Brown Ale dig into Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl" campaign this year. And now, Hidden Valley Ranch hopes to do the same with popular YouTubers,
the Holderness Family.
Penn and Kim Holderness are former TV news anchors who became an Internet sensation with 2013's "Xmas Jammies" video, which has been watched nearly 16 million times online. The family's videos put obnoxious twists on popular songs with personal anecdotes. Most recently, they parodied Meghan Trainor's "All About That Bass" song with the Thanksgiving-themed "All About That Baste."
This time, the Holdernesses are preparing for their own Super Bowl party. But instead of watching the game with friends, the parents are dealing with a regular Sunday night, which means getting the kids ready for bed and eating dinner with child bibs on.
"All the guys who aren't dads get to laugh at ads," raps Penn.
And indeed, their friends are watching the game with lots of food—including, of course, Hidden Valley Ranch dressing. But luckily, there's a twist, as the friends' party goes astray and the Holderness Family (and the brand) get to save the day.
As other brandshave done, Hidden Valley is trying to make product placement not feel like product placement (while, of course, spending much less than producing a TV ad). But in this case, the video is very clearly an ad for Hidden Valley Ranch dressing. And how you feel about it might depend on how you feel about this family in general.
The ad is part of a bigger partnership between the Holderness Family and SheKnows Media, a women's lifestyle media platform. The campaign is one of the first projects to come out of SheKnows Media's SK Studio, which creates branded content for advertisers. SheKnows Media claims to reach 84.5 million monthly users.
In conjunction with the video, Hidden Valley Ranch is also sponsoring a piece of content called "It's Sunday Night."
It's not clear how many videos the Holderness Family will create for SheKnows Media (or if they will be sponsored), but the publisher claims its partnership with the YouTube group is about finding a fit for its content.
"We gravitated toward the Holderness Family for their humorous approach to creating videos that are highly relatable and reflect their everyday lives," SheKnows Media's chief revenue officer Samantha Skey said in a statement.
