Bimbo Bakeries Rewrites Hollywood to Sell Donuts in Colombia
Bimbo Bakeries launched "Round Endings" in Colombia in February 2019, a three-asset social film campaign created by McCann Bogotá that reimagined the conclusions of Titanic, E.T., and A Star Is Born as happier alternatives, linking the concept of a perfect ending directly to the round shape of Bimbo Donuts.
The campaign arrived on Colombian social media channels during the 2019 Oscars ceremony on February 24, 2019, as reported by Ads of the World and documented on clapboard.com. Timing was the campaign's first strategic lever. The Academy Awards represent one of the highest-profile entertainment moments in the global calendar, and in Colombia, as elsewhere, the ceremony generates concentrated public attention toward the very films being referenced. By choosing Titanic, E.T., and A Star Is Born — three properties with emotionally resonant, widely remembered endings — McCann Bogotá ensured the films themselves were already part of the cultural conversation on the night the campaign ran.
The creative mechanic is precise and self-contained. Each of the three films is given an alternative conclusion, one that is warmer, more resolved, and implicitly "rounder" than the original. That roundness is not metaphorical decoration: it connects directly to the physical form of Bimbo Donuts, the product at the centre of the campaign. The result is a product truth expressed through storytelling rather than through a conventional product demonstration. A Star Is Born had particular cultural salience at that moment: the film won Best Original Song for "Shallow" at the 2019 Oscars, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, making it one of the most-discussed properties of the ceremony. The campaign's three-film structure gave it the breadth to speak to multiple audience segments simultaneously, covering a 1997 science-fiction classic, a 1982 family film, and a contemporary awards-season title within a single coherent campaign idea.
McCann Bogotá identified a specific cultural window and built the entire campaign around it. The Oscars ceremony is an established second-screen event, meaning audiences in Colombia and globally engage with social media simultaneously while watching the broadcast, creating a ready-made environment for a brand to enter the conversation with relevant creative content. Rather than buying conventional advertising time, Bimbo Bakeries used social film to participate in an organic cultural moment, a strategy that requires both creative precision and timing discipline.
The competitive landscape for packaged baked goods in Colombia includes established multinational operators. Grupo Nutresa, whose brands include Noel and Tosh, competes directly in the Colombian snack and bakery category, as does Kraft Heinz with its imported and locally distributed product lines. In that environment, brand differentiation increasingly depends on emotional and cultural relevance rather than on price or distribution alone. The "Round Endings" campaign pursues differentiation through pop-culture fluency, positioning Bimbo Donuts as a brand that understands entertainment and shared experience rather than one that simply sells a product.
Grupo Bimbo S.A.B. de C.V., the Mexican multinational parent of Bimbo Bakeries, operates across Latin America and maintains a documented long-term agency relationship with McCann in Colombia. According to latinspots.com, that relationship extended at least from the 2019 "Round Endings" campaign through to at least April 2023, with subsequent work including the "#HazloPorqueTeGusta" campaign launched in January 2022 across Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as also reported by clapboard.com. The continuity of that relationship suggests that the strategic approach established in 2019 — culturally timed, conceptually tight social content — was validated by the client as a repeatable model.
Juan Gómez served as creative director on "Round Endings," with Saskya Tamayo and María Fernanda Hidalgo as art directors, Stephanie Calderón as copywriter, and Saskya Tamayo also credited as illustrator, according to adsoftheworld.com. The dual role held by Tamayo — art direction and illustration — is significant, because it signals that the campaign's visual language was executed through illustration rather than live-action footage or photographic reproduction of the source films.
That creative decision is both practical and conceptually sound. Reproducing actual footage from Titanic, E.T., or A Star Is Born would raise immediate intellectual property questions and would anchor the work too closely to the studios' own visual grammar. Illustration, by contrast, allows the creative team to evoke the films through recognisable visual shorthand — character silhouettes, compositional references, colour palettes — while producing something original. Tamayo's illustration work gives each of the three films its own visual treatment within a consistent campaign aesthetic, and the round form of the donut is integrated into each reimagined ending as both the narrative resolution and the product reference.
The three-film structure distributes the creative labour and the audience appeal evenly. Titanic carries nostalgia and melodrama; E.T. carries cross-generational family sentiment; A Star Is Born carries contemporary awards-season prestige. Together they represent a range of emotional registers — romantic tragedy, childhood wonder, creative ambition — all of which the campaign reframes through the same unifying device. The copywriting by Stephanie Calderón would have needed to compress each alternative ending into a format short enough for social media consumption while retaining enough narrative clarity to register immediately with viewers already familiar with the source material. Production credits beyond the named creative team are not publicly documented for this campaign.
No verified performance data for "Round Endings" is publicly available. No sales lift figures, social media reach metrics, engagement rates, or market-share changes connected to the campaign have been published by Bimbo Bakeries, McCann Bogotá, or any third-party measurement body, as confirmed by clapboard.com and adsoftheworld.com. Similarly, no advertising awards from Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards are reported in connection with this campaign.
Structurally, the campaign carries several properties associated with effective social content. Oscar-night timing creates a natural amplification window: audiences are already discussing the nominated films, which lowers the barrier to engagement for content that references them directly. The illustration format keeps production costs contained while enabling original creative output. The product-truth connection — round endings, round donut — is a single, memorable idea that survives compression to short-form social video, which is the format most likely to be shared or saved rather than passively viewed.
The Clapboard Score for "Round Endings" is 71 out of 100. That score reflects a campaign with a well-constructed central concept and culturally aware timing, assessed against the absence of documented performance outcomes and the lack of industry recognition. The score places the campaign in the competent-to-strong range for a social film campaign produced for a mass-market food brand in Colombia in 2019, where the primary measure of success would have been organic reach and brand salience generated during a high-attention cultural moment rather than a sustained media buy.
"Round Endings" is a three-film social media campaign created by McCann Bogotá for Bimbo Donuts in Colombia in February 2019. It reimagined the endings of Titanic, E.T., and A Star Is Born as happier alternatives, connecting the idea of a perfect, complete ending to the round shape of Bimbo Donuts, as documented by clapboard.com and adsoftheworld.com.
Bimbo Bakeries timed the campaign to the 2019 Oscars ceremony on February 24, 2019. The ceremony is a high-attention cultural moment when audiences actively discuss nominated films on social media. Releasing content referencing Titanic, E.T., and A Star Is Born on that night placed Bimbo Donuts inside an existing conversation, according to adsoftheworld.com.
Juan Gómez served as creative director. Saskya Tamayo and María Fernanda Hidalgo were art directors. Stephanie Calderón was the copywriter. Saskya Tamayo also acted as illustrator for the campaign, giving the three films distinct illustrated visual treatments, according to adsoftheworld.com.
McCann Bogotá used original illustration, led by Saskya Tamayo, rather than reproducing studio footage. This approach enabled creative reference to Titanic, E.T., and A Star Is Born through recognisable visual shorthand while producing fully original assets and avoiding intellectual property constraints tied to the studios' own film material.
No advertising awards are reported for "Round Endings." According to clapboard.com, the campaign has no documented recognition from Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards. The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100.
The campaign links alternative film conclusions to the physical shape of Bimbo Donuts. A round ending — complete, resolved, whole — mirrors the circular form of the donut itself. This product-truth connection, documented by clapboard.com, transforms a visual product attribute into a narrative device across all three films.
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