Strings and Things Turns Cheestrings Into a Masterbrand With One Bizarrely Memorable Campaign
Strings and Things is a 2019 integrated advertising campaign created by Rothco | Accenture Interactive for Kerry Foods, launching a new masterbrand portfolio in Ireland that united Cheestrings with companion products Yollies and Cheeshapes under a single, deliberately repetitive brand identity built to lodge itself in the memory of Irish families.
The strategic ambition behind the campaign was architectural. Kerry Foods was no longer marketing a single product. As confirmed by Clapboard's editorial record, the brand needed Irish consumers to understand that Cheestrings — already a household name — had effectively joined a band, with the new Strings and Things range serving as the group's collective identity. The challenge was not awareness of the individual products but recognition of the new masterbrand name, and the creative solution was characteristically blunt: say the name as many times as humanly possible within a campaign framework that made the repetition feel like entertainment rather than instruction.
In Ireland, the campaign published in August 2019 and activated across television, video-on-demand, social media, and radio, according to Clapboard's production documentation. Two television commercials anchored the media plan, supported by radio content that included notably compressed executions designed to maximise frequency across broadcast touchpoints. The back-to-school window — one of the most commercially significant moments in the Irish Food and Drink calendar for children's products — provided the launch context, with Rothco timing the campaign's full broadcast rollout to coincide with Irish children returning to school in September 2019, as reported by Adworld Ie. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 70 out of 100.
Cheestrings originally launched in Britain and Ireland in 1996. According to Businessplus Ie, the product entered the market with the tagline Real A-peelable Cheese, targeting children aged six to twelve — a demographic that remained central to the brand's commercial identity more than two decades later. By 2019, that strong single-product equity created a specific strategic problem: expanding into a broader portfolio without cannibalising the recognition already built around the Cheestrings name.
Rothco's answer was to treat the masterbrand transition as a creative problem rather than a media one. Rather than gradually phasing in the Strings and Things name through conventional product advertising, the agency built the entire campaign around the act of name repetition itself, making the frequency of the brand mention the joke, the hook, and the message simultaneously. As documented by marcommnews.com, Kerry Foods committed a budget of £3 million to the campaign, covering television, video-on-demand, social media, and radio — a media investment that signals the commercial seriousness of the masterbrand transition in the Irish and broader market context.
The competitive landscape for children's cheese snacks in Ireland in 2019 placed Cheestrings alongside rivals including Dairylea and BabyBel, both of which had established brand recognition in the lunchbox segment. The Strings and Things campaign did not attempt to out-feature either competitor. Instead, it pursued a distinctly different objective: brand architecture clarity, ensuring that Irish consumers understood that the new range was a family, not a rebrand, with Cheestrings retaining its identity as a founding member of a wider portfolio, as confirmed by stringsandthings.com.
Director Greg Barth led the film production for the Strings and Things campaign, working through production company BlinkInk — a studio with a strong track record in character-driven and animation-adjacent live-action work, as recorded in Clapboard's production credits. The two television commercials leaned into a kitchen-set domestic fantasy anchored by the return of Mr Strings, Cheestrings' long-standing brand character, now reimagined as a saxophone-playing participant in a household musical moment, according to adworld.ie.
The creative team at Rothco was led by executive creative director Alan Kelly, with Rob Maguire serving as creative director and copywriter and Fabiano Dalmácio as art director, as documented by bestadsontv.com and shots.net. The conceit of the campaign — a band forming around the Strings and Things name — gave Maguire's copywriting a structural device: every iteration of the brand name in dialogue, song, or visual treatment became a legitimate creative beat rather than mere product signposting. The result is a campaign that uses repetition as a formal strategy rather than a media scheduling artifact.
Post-production was handled by Glassworks, with VFX supervisor Mark Harris overseeing the visual effects work that gave the campaign its heightened, slightly surreal domestic quality, per Clapboard's production records. Editing was completed by Nick Armstrong at Cut+Run. Director of photography Tim Green shot the campaign, and Janet Smith served as producer, as documented by Clapboard. Media agency Vizeum planned and bought the campaign's distribution across Irish broadcast and digital platforms, ensuring the compressed radio executions and television spots reached the target audience with the frequency the name-repetition strategy required.
No verified performance data for the Strings and Things campaign is publicly available in terms of sales uplift, brand tracking shifts, or media-specific return metrics. Kerry Foods did not publish consumer response figures, and no independent measurement body has released campaign-specific results for this activity in the Irish market.
Structural analysis, however, supports a credible effectiveness case. The campaign solved a genuinely difficult brand architecture problem — the transition from a single iconic product to a masterbrand portfolio — using a creative mechanism that made the solution legible without requiring consumer education. By embedding the brand name inside an entertainment conceit, the campaign reduced the cognitive load of learning a new name while sustaining the emotional register that made Cheestrings a trusted product in Irish households for over two decades, as noted by businessplus.ie in its coverage of the brand's history.
The £3 million media investment, as reported by marcommnews.com and grocerytrader.co.uk, placed the campaign at a scale appropriate for meaningful penetration across Irish television, radio, and digital video platforms during the back-to-school period — a window confirmed by talkingretail.com as a primary commercial moment for children's food and drink brands. The timing, the frequency strategy, and the character continuity provided by Mr Strings each represent structural choices that compound rather than cancel one another. For a campaign with no awards documentation in the public record, the Strings and Things work by Rothco | Accenture Interactive represents a disciplined piece of brand-building craft in the Irish Food and Drink category.
Strings and Things is a 2019 integrated campaign created by Rothco | Accenture Interactive for Kerry Foods in Ireland. It launched a new masterbrand portfolio uniting Cheestrings, Yollies, and Cheeshapes under one brand identity, using deliberate name repetition as both the creative strategy and the consumer education mechanism across TV, radio, VOD, and social media.
Greg Barth directed the Strings and Things campaign. Barth worked through production company BlinkInk, with cinematography by Tim Green and editing by Nick Armstrong at Cut+Run. The executive creative director at Rothco was Alan Kelly, with Rob Maguire as creative director and copywriter and Fabiano Dalmácio as art director, as documented by bestadsontv.com and shots.net.
Kerry Foods invested £3 million in the Strings and Things campaign, according to marcommnews.com and grocerytrader.co.uk. The campaign ran across television, video-on-demand, social media, and radio in Ireland, launching in August 2019 and reaching full broadcast activation around the back-to-school period in September 2019, as reported by adworld.ie.
Cheestrings became part of the Strings and Things masterbrand as Kerry Foods expanded its children's cheese portfolio beyond a single product. As confirmed by stringsandthings.com, the new range brought together Cheestrings, Yollies, and Cheeshapes under one roof. The 2019 campaign addressed the challenge of building recognition for the new masterbrand name without diminishing Cheestrings' established equity.
The Strings and Things campaign used television, video-on-demand, social media, and radio across the Irish market, as documented by Clapboard's production records and confirmed by adworld.ie. Media planning and buying was handled by Vizeum. The campaign included two television commercials and radio executions, with notably compressed radio formats designed to maximise brand-name frequency.
Cheestrings launched in Britain and Ireland in 1996 with the tagline Real A-peelable Cheese, according to businessplus.ie. The brand originally targeted children aged six to twelve and built its identity around the Mr Strings character. By 2019, that two-decade heritage formed the equity base from which Rothco and Kerry Foods constructed the broader Strings and Things masterbrand portfolio.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
