After finding success with mass advertising in Western Canada, tortilla brand Casa Mendosa is spreading its campaign across the country with a greater focus on authenticity.
The new creative in the Weston Foods brand’s “Pasión por las Tortillas” campaign, once again coinciding with Cinco de Mayo, includes TV and digital video that plays with telenovela tropes. This time, however, the creative begins with a host appearing to be hosting a simple educational video about how to say things relevant to a Cinco de Mayo meal “in telenovela,” before morphing into a Telenovela star, with glam makeup and a wind machine, as she explains how she woke up from a coma and inherited her husband’s estate.
This year, the media buy is national and includes digital, Facebook, Instagram and, for the first time, TikTok.
After focusing its first mass campaign last year on Western Canada, the brand has rounded out the campaign in a bigger way, says Samira Amin, Weston’s senior marketing manager. In addition to the videos, the brand has released a social media filter that allows anyone to become a soap star themselves, getting a glam makeover and playful show subtitles, like “gasps in Spanish.”
Last year’s campaign was meant to be a test for Casa Mendosa’s mass advertising, focusing on a region where the brand had strong growth and penetration. Amin tells strategy the company was pleased with the results, showing that sticking with a telenovela approach and attempting to own a holiday closely tied with the product would be a worthwhile approach for a national rollout.
According to Amin, during COVID, tortilla demand is up and Weston wants to make sure the brand continues to be relevant with a mainstream audience by focusing on its main differentiator.
“For us, Casa is one of the leading authentic style Mexican brands,” she says. “Our product is triple-baked so in that sense, that’s a point of differentiation…and that’s how we really pull away from the pack.”
The campaign is a partnership with long-term AOR, Union, which also handled below-the-line media buying. Dentsu handled the TV buy.
The tortilla category is currently worth over $200 million and represents 10% of the total packaged bakery category. In March, George Weston announced it is selling Weston Foods – which includes the Casa Mendosa, Wonder, D’Italiano, Country Harvest and Ace Bakery brands – in order to focus on its retail and real estate business.
