Where is my Skippy Place?

Skippy Peanut Butter is singing a new song about someplace. But where?

Skippy Peanut Butter has been around for a long, long time. And like most peanut butters they have traditionally targeted a younger audience – kids. But here in the age of pandemics and being stuck indoors, Skippy has moved up the age level to the 20 somethings. Which, it would seem, would be a smart move. Kids will always go for peanut butter and usually whichever brand Mom buys. So this legacy brand is now looking to kids who have grown up with the brand and is hoping to keep their loyalty. Again, smart move. But this new campaign doesn’t check all the boxes for me.

“Go to your Skippy Place.” It’s a good line to support the strategy of appealing to an older target who hopefully remembers the good times growing up with peanut butter at the reach. Playing with friends, playing with pets, all the fun things that memories of peanut butter can bring to the top of our list of favorite childhood experiences. But then… 

What kind of jingle/rap is this? There’s some kind of music going on, but the voices are speaking more like rappers than singing. And, what did that shoe just say? Somehow the way this music and vocal is mixed makes it very hard to understand the lyrics. There’s some reverb or echo or electronica added to the voices that blends with the music so the lyrics are not separated from the music and it’s just one really-hard-to-understand piece of music.

There is also the lighting change. What does it mean? Are we now in a night club? Have we gone into a dream? Did someone drug the peanut butter? Are we now tripping out? Teddy bears, shoes and even people in framed photos are sing/rapping as well. But nobody’s saying anything about any kind of place or going anywhere.

Then finally once you’ve watched the spots several times to try to figure out the lyrics, when you get them, what do they mean? What IS my Skippy Place? I understand “Your Skippy Place” is a state of mind but does this execution really convey that concept?

This campaign looks pretty on screen, but in a family room environment, at a commercial break, this message is so complex it doesn’t engage by satisfaction. The color, music and action engage without connection. But somehow I’m sure most viewers will come away singing or humming “Go, go to your Skippy Place!” from the end of the spot. And I guess that’s all we really want as marketers is for the audience to remember that one phrase, everything else is superfluous. 

So, I’m in a brand love/hate relationship with this campaign. At this point I think I’m going to go to my “peanut butter makes me anxious” place.