A new Super Bowl ad for Cheetos stars MC Hammer. Cheetos
If you ask Stanley Kirk Burrell about his favorite Cheetos memory from childhood, it doesn’t take him long. He remembers the Fremont Pool in his hometown of Oakland, California, where he and his friends took breaks from swimming to walk over to the supermarket for Cheetos and sodas.
“When I think about Cheetos, besides the taste, what I’ve always loved is the crunch,” he told Forbes in an interview. “The crunch was both fulfilling and filling. You could eat some other snacks and say ‘Okay I’m good.’ But when you eat Cheetos, you actually kind of get full.”
That memory from decades ago is coming full circle. Burrell—who grew up to become MC Hammer—stars in a new Super Bowl ad for Cheetos featuring “Can’t Touch This,” his most famous song that also happens to turns 30 year old this year.
The 30-second commercial—created by the San Francisco-based agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and directed by Harold Einstein—will be the first time in more than a decade that Cheetos has made an appearance in the Big Game. The purpose: to promote the new Cheetos Popcorn, which as anyone might have guessed based on the song selection, riffs off the realty that eating Cheetos make touching anything a bit of a messy situation.
The spot itself features a man in various scenes eating a bag of Cheetos popcorn to get out of various situations as MC Hammer pops up here and there along the way. But MC Hammer said one of his favorite scenes is actually part of the teaser that debuted last week. The scene shows seated by a piano, humming a song while eating a bag of Cheetos with old-school packaging. As he looks to press a key, he realizes his hands are full of orange dust.
“Wait,” he says. “I can’t touch this.”
That’s when the revelation sinks in that maybe the lyric might be a little sticky, too.
According to Rachel Ferdinando, CMO of Pepsi’s Frito-Lay brand, the dust that Cheetos has become infamous for actually has a name: Cheetle. While the snack itself has been around since the late 1940s, the term was trademarked in 2005. However, the term has never really been promoted by Pepsi or Frito-Lay until now.
Asked when the brand trademarked the term, it’s been so long that Pepsi North America CMO Greg Lyons couldn’t remember the exact year offhand—explaining that they’ve been calling it Cheetle since “forever.”
“We started by just telling people this has a name and it’s called Cheetle and we thought about how to tell this story, when you’ve got Cheetle on your hands, you can’t touch this,” Ferdinando said. “It’s a very true thing. And so when you can’t touch things, there’s this oh….can’t touch this?’”
That’s when the idea hit them.
“And that’s how the whole MC Hammer thing happened,” Ferdinando said. “The concept fits really well and given it was a nostalgic moment for us coming back after 11 years, who better to partner with than with the iconic artist MC Hammer who is loved by everyone it seems and the song is iconic.”
Over the years, MC Hammer has been in a number of commercials for brand like Lay’s, Lysol and Citibank. And in 2009, he was in another Super Bowl spot for Cash4Gold, starring with Ed McMahon.
“I’ve always loved acting,” he said. “The combination of being patient on the set and knowing how to deliver the emotions for the director.”
