Gut gets creative with America's favorite cream cheese

Philadelphia Cream Cheese by Kraft Heinz is the source of a lot of creative cooking and baking or simply snacking. Kicking off the summer season right before the July 4th holiday was part of the brief that the Gut Agency received with just weeks to produce and complete. The goal was to find the most creative ways people use cream cheese, besides spreading it on a bagel.

It turns out some put cream cheese in their coffee instead of milk. The search also found that Americans use it as a great potato salad ingredient and of course the much loved cheesecake or spread on a cracker or crunchy vegetable as a mid-afternoon snack.

The Gut team started with writing unique, unforgettable song lyrics and they needed to find the perfect vocalist to stream on Spotify and Apple across all their paid channels for this fun and might we add “ear-worm”, highly catchy spot.

Curate, Review + License in Under Three Weeks

Gut’s team worked closely with Catch+Release throughout, starting with curating the highest quality, on-brief video content uncovered across three different curation deliveries. What’s more the curation team found the actual singer who sang those custom lyrics amazingly well. It’s the “song of the summer”, commented one TikTok follower. The goal was to “find someone with a presence on TikTok, over 100k followers and currently not signed to a label”. And yes, it had to be a country music singer. It’s actually hard to believe that this great vocalist didn’t have a signed contract already. Travis Yee was the chosen talent.

In just three weeks the team found the vocalist-for-hire and cleared 69 best-fit shots, ready to license for the final spot. The Catch+Release clearance team moved swiftly clearing all requested shots in under 5 days and team Gut met their deadline with the client working collaboratively inside the Catch+Release platform, staying updated at each step with in-platform notifications. The final delivery included all videos, ready to be produced using split screens, timed to the lyrics and of course stitched together with the final soundtrack.

Smooth Transition to Licensing

The reason this campaign worked so well and delivered on-time was due to the fact the entire team engaged in the platform working side-by-side with our customer success team. Gut’s, producer, executive producer, copywriter and business affairs team-members stayed involved from the outset. They collaborated on all collections delivered and they also viewed all possible alternative videos, just in case the clearance time frame wasn’t met. It’s always good to have backups especially when you need to see all the possibilities.

Catch+Release has a growing creator community which comprises assets from creators that know and love working with Catch+Release and want to license their work with beloved brands like Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

24 Million Views + Counting

I reckon this constitutes a really big hit. In fact one TikTok follower thinks this song is better than Taylor Swift. The spot is streaming on Spotify, Apple music and is running as a digital campaign across a number of platforms including YouTube.

It’s so catchy you have to watch it over a few times because the lyrics are perfectly timed with the videos of people enjoying the delicious treats. That one big block of cheese plopping down was a must-have. We adore this spot. As much as the song stays in your head all day, you just can’t help singing along and I’m sure to rush out to buy some yummy creaaaammm cheese for that next delicious snack. Have a great 2024 summer everyone. Thanks to team Gut and Kraft Heinz for giving us some joy heading into the long hot summer days ahead.