What if you were a nationally beloved brand in a highly commoditized category? How do you leverage your brand affinity to create raving fans and irrational loyalty? Kraft did a pretty great job by not only being incredibly timely and topical, but by being authentic to the fun-ness of the Jell-O brand ideals, and very creative in their execution.

Rather than paying top dollar to buy a spot during the Super Bowl, they opted for a post-game celebration of San Francisco “being #2”. Their commercial touted free Jell-O pudding cups across the Bay area on Tuesday (a much more fun tactic than the hugely popular free Grand Slam breakfast offered to everyone by Denny’s a few years ago). In three days Jell-O received over 100,000 more YouTube views to their viral stunt than their total Facebook fan base. That’s a touchdown in my book.

But where Jell-O really went from good to great is in their multichannel execution. While the TV commercial was well done, their microsite is excellent, offering coupons, maps to the drop sites, Instagram feeds of the experience, and a “Baltimore Blocker” Google Chrome widget that allows San Fransisco fans to remove all mentions of the Ravens’ victory from their web-browsing experience. And their street-level execution was equally well done with giant crates of Jell-O pudding cups appearing on random street corners throughout the day.

Kudos to Kraft for executing a such a great and timely engagement strategy that surely won Jell-O some new brand fans.