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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
