How Fruit by the Foot Won Teen Culture
By Making Them Lose (The Game)
Inside Jokes Live in DMs Now
IYKYK—in 2025, Gen Z-ers camped out in private DMs. In response to this behavior shift, we spotted an opportunity hiding in plain sight: If teens were trading inside jokes in their group chats instead of posting publicly, what if a brand could create an inside joke so good it demanded to be shared?
Challenge accepted. We needed to crack the code on arcane teen culture and engineer content that felt authentically native to their DMs, not like an ad trying to infiltrate their conversations. For Fruit by the Foot, that meant tapping into something teens already knew and loved, then making it unmistakably ours.
The Objective: Turn Sharing Into Strategy
Our mission was to create content that Gen Z audiences didn’t just engage with, but couldn’t resist sharing. The goal was to increase engagement by driving social shares at scale, transforming Fruit by the Foot from a familiar snack brand into a bona fide cultural player in the daily digital lives of today’s teens.
Success would be measured not just by views or likes, but by shares, the undisputed currency of relevance in Gen Z’s private-message-first world. We needed to engineer virality that exploded organically the group chat, not the feeds they scrolled past.
Fruit by the Foot is a snack that’s meant to be played with (it’s in the product’s DNA). So, we asked: How do we create content that is just as playable (and shareable) as the snack?
The Strategy
Enter “The Game,” a relentless, maddening mental challenge worshipped by teen pranksters, where the only rule of “The Game” is not to think about “The Game.”
It’s the ultimate inside joke: deliciously annoying, ruthlessly addictive, and infinitely shareable. By commandeering “The Game” and making it unmistakably Fruit by the Foot’s, we could turn a participatory prank into a branded moment.
To outsmart our hyper-savvy teen audience, we needed ownability. The unlock? Leveraging the product’s most unique and recognizable attribute: its ridiculous, endlessly unspooling length.
We created the “Pull Me” prank: content that seduced viewers into interacting, only to reveal they’d just lost “The Game.” The caption? “Absolutely diabolical.” Teens ate it up and immediately shared it with friends to make them lose, too.
The Execution: Catching Them Again (And Again)
The “Pull Me” prank worked. 11.2 million people fell for it organically, and they shared it over 128 million times. But we knew one prank wouldn’t cut it. To keep teens perpetually paranoid, we invented new ways to catch them, using wildly unpredictable hooks in deceptively innocuous settings.
From a simple game of catch to engagement-baiting audio cues, each iteration ensured they never had a chance of keeping the prank fresh and the shares flowing for over six months.
The Results
An Inside Joke Worth Sharing:
111MM
organic impressions
377MM
shares across social channels
+400%
engagement rate increase YoY