Gareth Maguire is a senior marketing director for Kellogg Co.’s Pringles brand. The following is excerpted from a conversation Feb. 9 and edited for clarity.

Why was the approach you took to your Super Bowl ad this year the right one for Pringles in 2022?

For our Super Bowl ad, we needed to be original, unique, humorous and honest. One of the things we talk about a lot is OPCDI: Only Pringles Can Do It. The origin of the ad was, there’s already a lot out there on the Internet about ‘I’m at the bottom of a Pringles can, how am I going to get the last one out?’ We’ve had a lot of people come to us with questions about that, and inventions they’ve come up with about how to get the last chip out. They’ve asked us about whether we could make the can wider. They’ve gone out of their way to talk to us about this.

It’s something that’s happened to 43% of our fans, so it’s something that people can relate to because it’s happened to them. And while telling the story about that, there’s not many adverts where the product is in the story from beginning to end.

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Julio Nuñez, who plays the lead character, was terrific. How did you bring this vision to life?

We have this internal debate every year: Should we use a celebrity? Should we not use a celebrity? This year, we were able to add that celebrity X-factor with the Lionel Richie track “Stuck on You,” which was the perfect lyric, told a love story and just worked really well for us. And our director [Tom Kuntz] brought a great level of cinematography to the shoot. He brought it to a whole other level.

We’d been playing around with this idea for about a year, and we’d been getting quite energized about it as we built up the storyboards. But when we got a look at the first cut in January, after Tom and his team had done their work, we thought ‘Wow. This is even better than we thought.’ They’d taken those ideas off the board, and made it even better.

What can other brands and marketers learn from your experience?

If you think about what we’ve done, we’ve managed to create a full story—a love story, and a life story—about things that have always been a part of the brand. We’re not talking about a new package, a new feature, or a new flavor. It’s just the fundamental underpinning of our story from day one.

There’s something quite interesting about that, and hats off to the creative teams for managing to tell an engaging story just from the core premise of a can of Pringles. I think it can very interesting to take a fresh look at your core proposition, and that’s something I think we’ve done a very good job of here. We didn’t have to educate consumers; this was something that was always there.