American Pecan Promotion Board's Surprisingly Snackable campaign, created by Signal Theory and SixTwentySix in 2024, repositions pecans from holiday baking
American Pecan Promotion Board Bets on Everyday Snacking With Surprisingly Snackable
The American Pecan Promotion Board's Surprisingly Snackable campaign is a 2024 integrated marketing effort, created by Signal Theory and creative studio SixTwentySix, that repositions pecans from a seasonal holiday-baking ingredient into a convenient, nutritious everyday snack for consumers across the United States.
Launched in June 2024, the campaign operates across Digital, Film, and OOH media channels, deploying three distinct creative concepts — titled Squirrel Bro, Proper Granny, and The Other Half — to communicate the versatility and nutritional credentials of pecans. Each execution leads with humor to make the snacking proposition immediately accessible to a broad family audience, while the underlying brand message foregrounds plant-based protein, dietary fiber, and sustained energy as the functional pillars of the pecan's everyday appeal.
The campaign's media footprint in the United States is deliberately multi-platform. CTV and streaming placements ran on Prime Video, Hulu, Cooking Channel, Fox, and Bravo, according to producebusiness.com. Alongside broadcast and streaming, the American Pecan Promotion Board activated e-commerce placements, in-store retail partnerships, influencer programming, and OOH executions, creating a full-funnel presence designed to intercept consumers at the moment of snack consideration rather than at the seasonal baking aisle. The three campaign films together represent the Narrative spine of the work, grounding each comic scenario in a shared truth: that pecans are a snack nutritious enough to share with the whole family and satisfying enough to keep for oneself. The campaign was submitted to Clapboard and carries a Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100, reflecting competent strategic ambition paired with execution that remains largely within category conventions.
Signal Theory built the Surprisingly Snackable strategy on a single, well-documented consumer reality. As Creative Director Joe Wilper noted in PerishableNews in June 2024, many people have pecans anchored in their mind for a particular use, meaning the primary strategic task was not awareness-building but perception-shifting — moving the pecan from a mental shelf labelled holiday baking to one labelled everyday snacking.
The strategic context in the United States is competitive. The snack-nuts category is dominated by almonds, and the American Pecan Promotion Board's own 2022 national campaign data, as reported by georgiapecans.org, illustrates the scale of that challenge: after that campaign lifted pecan top-of-mind awareness from eleven percent to twenty-eight percent over approximately three weeks, pecans still ranked second behind almonds, which scored thirty-four percent. Brands such as Blue Diamond Growers, which markets almonds aggressively across the United States under its Snack Almonds sub-brand, and Fisher Nuts, a longstanding presence in the baking-to-snacking crossover space, occupy the competitive terrain the American Pecan Promotion Board is actively contesting with the Surprisingly Snackable work.
Signal Theory, a branding agency recognized for its behavioral science approach to marketing, structured the repositioning around reducing what behavioral economists call the cognitive switching cost — the mental effort required for consumers to reimagine a familiar product in an unfamiliar context. SixTwentySix, the creative studio collaborating on production, channeled that strategic brief into humorous Narrative scenarios that normalize casual, spontaneous pecan snacking. According to dataintelo.com, the North American snack-nuts market was the largest regional segment globally at a substantial scale in 2024, confirming that the United States represents the highest-value geography for a repositioning play of this nature. The APPB's board had previously approved a twelve-million-dollar budget for fiscal year 2022–23, according to georgiapecans.org, signaling an organization with the financial commitment to sustain multi-year behavioral change.
Joe Wilper serves as Creative Director at Signal Theory on the Surprisingly Snackable campaign. In an interview published by PerishableNews in June 2024, Wilper described the creative approach directly: these spots use humor to showcase the appeal of pecans, not just for their buttery goodness, but also as a go-to snack that can be super satisfying and good for us. That statement functions as the creative brief made visible — the comedy is not decorative but structural, responsible for doing the repositioning work that a more earnest health-food register might resist.
The three Film executions — Squirrel Bro, Proper Granny, and The Other Half — each isolate a different snacking scenario and a different consumer archetype, according to adsoftheworld.com. The squirrel conceit in Squirrel Bro is particularly well-chosen: it invokes a universally understood cultural shorthand for hoarding desirable food, transforming an instinctive animal behavior into a flattering mirror for the viewer's own snacking impulse. The tagline Squirrel Tested, Dad Approved distills this dual-audience logic — family-friendly credibility and individual indulgence — into a single compact phrase.
The campaign's Digital and OOH executions extend the same visual and tonal language across formats, maintaining creative coherence across a media plan that spans streaming, connected television, out-of-home placements, and e-commerce environments. As Wilper told Candy Industry in July 2024, three creative spots showcase the versatility and appeal of pecans, a framing that reveals an intentional decision to use variety within the campaign rather than a single hero execution. SixTwentySix's production contribution ensures that the craft quality matches the strategic ambition, with the films carrying a finish consistent with the category's more premium executions. Production credits beyond Wilper's creative direction and SixTwentySix's studio role are not fully detailed in publicly available documentation.
The Surprisingly Snackable campaign produced measurable commercial results in the United States. According to eatpecans.com, in-store promotions executed across three hundred and fifty-two stores in twelve states generated a sixty-five-point-five percent year-over-year increase in pecan sales and a sixty-six-point-eight percent average increase in units sold. These figures represent the most direct evidence of the repositioning strategy translating into retail behavior change.
The campaign's retail activation included a six-week Kroger partnership, as reported by perishablenews.com, placing the American Pecan Promotion Board's messaging inside one of the United States' highest-footfall grocery chains at the point of purchase — the moment most adjacent to snack decision-making. The combination of upper-funnel CTV and OOH exposure with lower-funnel in-store activation created the full-funnel pressure required to convert repositioned perception into changed purchasing behavior.
On the awards circuit, the Surprisingly Snackable campaign won the 2025 AMIN Worldwide Globeys People's Choice Award for Best in Show, according to aminworldwide.com, a recognition that reflects both industry and peer validation of the campaign's creative and strategic effectiveness. The campaign also registered three thousand one hundred and thirty-three views and twenty likes on Clapboard at the time of submission, modest engagement figures that align with the platform's specialist professional audience rather than a consumer-facing channel. The Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its repositioning objective with clarity and commercial discipline, while stopping short of the category-redefining creative ambition that would push the score into the upper quartile.
Surprisingly Snackable is a 2024 integrated campaign by the American Pecan Promotion Board. Created by Signal Theory and SixTwentySix, it launched in the United States in June 2024 across Digital, Film, and OOH channels with the objective of repositioning pecans from a holiday-baking ingredient into an everyday nutritious snack.
Signal Theory created the Surprisingly Snackable campaign for the American Pecan Promotion Board. The branding agency, known for its behavioral science approach, collaborated with creative studio SixTwentySix on production. Creative Director Joe Wilper led the work, as quoted in PerishableNews and Candy Industry in June and July 2024 respectively.
The campaign drove a sixty-five-point-five percent year-over-year sales increase, according to eatpecans.com. In-store promotions ran across three hundred and fifty-two stores in twelve US states, alongside a six-week Kroger partnership, producing a sixty-six-point-eight percent average increase in units sold per perishablenews.com.
Surprisingly Snackable won the 2025 AMIN Worldwide Globeys People's Choice Award for Best in Show, according to aminworldwide.com. The recognition was shared by Signal Theory and the American Pecan Promotion Board, reflecting industry validation of the campaign's effectiveness in repositioning pecans within the competitive United States snack-nuts market.
The campaign includes three Film executions: Squirrel Bro, Proper Granny, and The Other Half, according to adsoftheworld.com. Each targets a distinct consumer archetype and snacking scenario. The tagline Squirrel Tested, Dad Approved anchors the humor strategy Creative Director Joe Wilper described in PerishableNews as central to shifting pecan perception.
The campaign ran across CTV and streaming platforms including Prime Video, Hulu, Cooking Channel, Fox, and Bravo in the United States, according to producebusiness.com. It also encompassed OOH placements, Digital and e-commerce activations, influencer programming, and in-store retail executions across three hundred and fifty-two stores in twelve states.
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