Kenan Thompson has a long history with the fruit-flavored candy pellets known as Mike and Ike.
“It’s one of those candies I remember grabbing at the movies or on a road trip, so there was already familiarity with it,” he recalls during a recent email exchange. Now he has a chance to bring new audiences to the venerable confection. Just Born, the candy company that first introduced Mike & Ike in 1940, has tapped the “SNL” veteran to direct a new ad campaign that executives hope will transform the familiar sweets into something even more palatable for young snackers.
The “SNL” mainstay supervised a new ad campaign – his commercial directorial debut – in which Mike and Ike are portrayed as characters for the first time. For decades, the names have simply referred to two kinds of fruit-flavored candy beans, one short and one longer.
“We treated them like any comedy duo. One character sees the world one way; the other sees it completely differently,” Thompson says. “Once you have that dynamic, you can drop them into almost any situation, and the jokes start finding you.”
The owner of Mike & Ike, Just Born Quality Confections, faces a challenge similar to those of other long-time candy manufactures that include Hershey or Ferrara Candy Co.: How to take products that have been around for years and render them interesting to a generation of young consumers who have very different food-consumption tastes than their elders? Ferrara has transformed its Nerds, once a box of fruit-flavored pebbles, into a crunchy-and-gummy curiosity that offers unique “mouth feel” to curious tastebuds. Hershey’s, perhaps the nation’s best-known purveyor of chocolate candy, has mixed caramel and “chocolate lava” into its famous Reese’s peanut butter cups.
