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If there’s one thing we all have in common, it’s that at one time or another every one of us has dreamed about poking The Pillsbury Doughboy in the belly. The friendly little mascot has been repping the Pillsbury Company for over half a century. But who is The Pillsbury Doughboy? How did he come to be one of the most recognizable mascots in America for generations?
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Today we're going to take a look at the poppin' fresh history of the Pillsbury Doughboy
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The Pillsbury Doughboy was actually the brainchild of Rudolph Rudy Pertz, a copywriter at the mammoth advertising agency Leo Burnett
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On March 18th, 1965, Pertz was trying to come up with a campaign for Pillsbury's line of refrigerated dough products
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He was in his kitchen testing out the crescent rolls. But when Pertz hit his canister on the countertop
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he had a vision of a plump little dough person popping out instead
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He named the character Poppin' Fresh and quickly scratched out an initial character design
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so artist Milt Schaefer, formerly of Disney Animation, was brought in to make it more distinct
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Pertz initially planned to make Poppin' Fresh an animated character, but after seeing the stop-motion animated techniques used in the opening credits of the Dinah Shore show
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he decided he wanted that instead. Filming the commercial was a painstaking task
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Animating the Doughboy required 24 individual shots per second, and his head had to be changed in each frame to make the movements of his mouth match his dialogue
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All the trouble and expense would all turn out to be worth it when the first commercial starring the Pillsbury Doughboy aired on November 7th, 1965
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In the ad, the character pops out of a roll of dough in front of a startled housewife and proclaims
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I'm poppin' fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy. He then sings a song about the pleasing scent of Pillsbury products
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and the woman in a moment that would prove iconic playfully pokes him in the belly causing him to emit a little hoot It doesn sound like much but it was enough The public immediately fell in love with Poppin
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Fresh. Since then, Poppin' Fresh has starred in over 600 commercials for over 50 different
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Pillsbury products. In 2004, he was inducted into the Advertising Week Walk of Fame. Believe it or
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not, the company may well have stolen Poppin' Fresh's design. In 2023, a Pillsbury employee
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discovered a doodle of the doughboy flexing his bicep on an old machine panel in a plant
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located in Springfield, Illinois. Various witnesses have claimed that in the 1950s and 60s
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an employee of the plant went around drawing such images on walls in the factory and might
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have submitted the design to Pillsbury. If it's true, the story would completely upend
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the company's claim that Pertz created the character in the mid-1960s. In 2024
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the company tweaked Poppin' Fresh's look in response to a 1% year-over-year decline in sales
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His legs got longer, his body got thinner, and his scarf changed from white to blue
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Apparently, this will help. But even with all the modern ts, the character looks and sounds remarkably similar to how he did in his very first appearance
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Studies have shown that brands which commit to long-term campaigns featuring an anthropomorphic
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character mascot stand to increase their profits almost 10% more than brands that use campaigns
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without such mascots. In other words, barring some cataclysmic event, the Pillsbury Doughboy
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will safely outlive us all. Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo
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