Twinkie, the Everlasting

Brand Power

One of the reasons the Twinkie has lasted all these years is persuasive advertising. Like all big companies, Hostess clearly understood how important it was to create a persona and personality that accompanied the Twinkie. This wasn’t simply a dessert; this was a snack movement. It started in the 1950s when Hostess used live television ads. Nostalgia plays an important role in many Twinkie lovers’ memories.

Curled up on the carpet in front of the television watching the Howdy Doody Show, cowboy hats tilted forward, big smiles as Mom waltzes in with a big glass of milk and two Twinkies resting on a plate.

In an old YouTube clip of the show you can watch Buffalo Bob Smith whipping up a batch of Twinkies and telling kids to beg their Moms for some of their own. Even Howdy himself shows kids how to find Twinkies in the grocery store. Popular taglines rang out, “the snack with a snack in the middle,” and “you get a big delight in every bite.”

These ads led to the creation of Twinkie the Kid, the cylindrical wrangler in a cowboy hat, has been a mainstay mascot for the snack cakes’ advertising for decades. The year 2005 brought a modernization of the kid. He’s jazzed up a bit now, resembling more of a brighter, cartoonish version of the original sketch.

Twinkies became a household name. They were deep-fried at state fairs and made cameos in movies like “Ghost Busters” and “Die Hard.”

In 1996, Ad agency Campbell Mithun helped develop “Critters,” a television ad that features a bear who mistakes a gold-coloured mobile home for a Twinkie and when he rips into the roof is disappointed to find humans inside.

He asked, “Hey, where’s the cream filling?”

Hostess also created effective tongue and cheek commercials during the London 2012 Olympic frenzy. In these clever ads they showed average athletes failing miserably at sport. A golden Twinkie appears after the words, “reach for the gold,” and the message, “not a sponsor” follows.

Even President Bill Clinton put a Twinkie in the White House Millennium Council’s time capsule alongside a piece of the Berlin Wall, a WWII helmet and a pair of Ray Charles’ sunglasses.

Not all the attention was positive. The term “Twinkie defense” came out of the 1979 murder trail of Dan White, whose lawyers included his obsession with junk food like Twinkies and Coca Cola among the evidence of his altered state of mind.