CASPER'S ICE CREAM

MAKING THE BEST ICE CREAM SANDWICH IN AMERICA THE MOST FAMOUS ONE TOO

FatBoy has outsold nearly every other ice cream sandwich in the country for years. Almost nobody knew why. Casper’s Ice Cream, the family company that has made FatBoy in Richmond, Utah since 1925, hired Agency Squid to close the gap between category leadership and brand recognition, and to give a quiet market leader a voice that matched its sales numbers.

Brand Strategy & Positioning
Creative Campaign Development
Verbal Identity & Packaging Copy
Video Production
Shopper Marketing & Retailer Creative

Deliverables

Research
Consumer Segmentation
Brand Strategy
Copywriting/Brand Voice
Videography/Photography
Packaging
Creative Production
Omnichannel Campaign

The Challenge

FatBoy is America’s #1 ice cream sandwich by sales. Brand awareness sat near 32%. Most shoppers who had eaten one did not know what made it different from anything else in the freezer case. That gap was the entire brief: educate people on what sets FatBoy apart, and earn it a spot in a routine, not just a cart.

The category made that harder. Ice cream sandwiches had fragmented into near-identical options. Most purchase decisions happen at the shelf in seconds, so the brand had to win recognition before it won any argument about quality. And FatBoy needed to do it across three audiences that did not want the same brand for the same reasons.

The Solution

The truth was clear. The houseplant category was exploding. However, no brand had claimed the emotional, design-forward space consumers craved. While retailers rode the wave of wellness and home personalization, Costa Farms still lacked a consumer-facing identity. Because of this, the brand needed a clearer way to meet the moment.

The opportunity was not just to grow plants. Instead, it was to grow culture. Agency Squid saw the real value beyond distribution scale. More importantly, the goal was to build a brand that made indoor greenery essential. As a result, Costa Farms could shape how a new generation lived, decorated, and defined self-care.

Research

The Insight Behind the Brand

Agency Squid’s research surfaced one truth that held across every segment: people had stopped apologizing for indulgence. They were not asking for permission anymore. They just needed proof the treat was worth it.

Three distinct audiences carried that truth in different directions:

Quality Indulgers want ingredients they recognize and a product that justifies its price with real quality, not marketing language.
Family Explorers want variety, playfulness, and shared moments, and are the most open to switching brands.
Wholesome Loyalists want the nostalgic, homemade taste they remember, balanced against wanting to feel good about the choice.

Positioning: No Guilt, No Trade-offs

Agency Squid built FatBoy’s full brand platform from that insight: brand essence, vision, mission, values, and a verbal identity system that made the voice consistent across packaging, social, retail, and campaign work. The line at the center of it: No guilt. No trade-offs. Just yes. FatBoy became the ice cream people reach for when “worth it” is the expectation, not a question.

The Work

Concept

From “Thick to the Point” to “Take a Thick Minute”

The first creative territory, “Thick to the Point,” tested well on product differentiation but read as too literal to carry a campaign. Agency Squid pressure-tested it against the brand’s three audiences and evolved it into “Take a Thick Minute,” a platform that turned FatBoy’s thickness into something worth pausing for: a deliberate, earned break in the middle of a busy day. The line that anchors every spot: Real ice cream. Real thick. Take a thick minute with FatBoy.

Seven Ways to Freeze a Moment

The campaign’s comedic engine is simple: someone takes a bite of a FatBoy and freezes mid-scene, completely at peace, while ordinary chaos keeps happening around them. Agency Squid wrote, cast, and produced seven video concepts built on that device, each set in a different everyday tension:

No Reason Craving, where a freezer alarm keeps beeping because the person standing in the open door will not stop mid-bite.
The Patient Teacher, where a parent holding a child’s bike freezes instead of letting go, ice cream sandwich in hand.
Family Chaos, where a parent sits in total bliss on a couch while a child and a dog climb over them.
Climbing Mount FatBoy
Tiny Wrapper
Stretch Before You Bite
Ruler

Agency Squid directed and produced the full series over a two-day live-action shoot with a family cast, shot on location and on set in Minneapolis, then carried the same platform into packaging, retail, and shopper marketing.

Packaging Copy Grounded in Sensory Science

Agency Squid’s packaging copywriting drew on peer-reviewed research on language and taste perception, including Elder and Krishna (2010) and Simmons, Martin, and Barsalou (2005). The finding: words that make a reader’s mouth rehearse an experience, like melt, velvety, and buttery, beat words that just announce a verdict, like delicious or premium. Consumers actively discount superlatives as puffery. Agency Squid rewrote FatBoy’s packaging copy around sensory language, then tuned the register per audience: concrete richness for Quality Indulgers, nostalgic warmth for Wholesome Loyalists (with a hard rule against any “lighter” or “guilt-free” framing, which that audience reads as a red flag), and playful discovery cues for Family Explorers.

Shopper Marketing at Shelf

Because most ice cream sandwich decisions happen at the freezer door, Agency Squid built a shopper marketing toolkit to carry the platform to shelf: endcap signage, freezer-door decals, and shelf talkers built around FatBoy’s thickness claim. For retail partners including Albertsons, Agency Squid produced ongoing waves of retailer-specific creative sized and versioned for each placement.

Two different visual styles under one social truth helped draw an audience even closer to the FatBoy brand.

Results

MEDIA SPEND AT 3X LESS THAN THE PREVIOUS YEAR, WITH 10X THE RESULTS

FatBoy’s campaign delivered on both sides of the funnel. On paid social, the top creative, ran at roughly three times a typical Meta benchmark, and every concept in the seven-video series cleared a 4% click-through rate with at least one audience, proof the platform worked across all three targeted segments, not just one. On organic search, sessions, impressions, and keyword footprint all grew in the same window, and AI Overview citations jumped from single digits to 41, showing the brand’s content now earns attention from both shoppers and search engines.

QUICK WINS

NoReasonCraving was the campaign’s breakout creative, posting a 7.8% to 10.1% link click-through rate across all three audience segments, peaking with Wholesome Loyalists
Across its full run, NoReasonCraving averaged close to a 9% click-through rate, roughly three times a typical Meta benchmark, at a $0.15 cost per click across 1.24 million impressions
Cost per click across the audience test ranged from $0.13 to $0.18
The Patient Teacher was the strongest performer with Family Explorers specifically, at a 9.1% link click-through rate
All seven video concepts cleared a 4% link click-through rate with at least one audience, showing the “freeze the moment” platform worked across all three targeted audiences, not just one
Agency Squid also rewrote FatBoy’s website copy across twelve pages in the new brand voice, the foundation the broader marketing program built on
Organic sessions grew 50% between November 2025 and June 2026
Google impressions grew 86%, with clicks up 52%
Organic keyword footprint grew from 1,117 to 1,481 terms
Google AI Overview citations grew from five to seven placements before the engagement to 41 by August 2026, evidence the brand’s content is now answerable by search and AI models, not just found by them

FatBoy Campaign FAQs

1. What does a CPG creative agency do for a brand like FatBoy?

A CPG creative agency builds the brand strategy, messaging, and creative campaigns that turn a product’s sales performance into consumer-facing recognition. For FatBoy, Agency Squid’s scope covered brand positioning, audience segmentation, campaign concept development, video production, packaging copywriting, and shopper marketing creative built for retail partners.

2. How did Agency Squid grow brand awareness for FatBoy Ice Cream?

Agency Squid built a brand platform, “Take a Thick Minute,” around a single consumer insight: shoppers no longer want permission to indulge, they want proof the treat is worth it. That platform ran across a seven-concept video campaign, packaging copy, and shopper marketing at shelf, giving a category leader with low awareness a consistent, recognizable voice across every touchpoint.

3. What makes a CPG brand strategy engagement different from a general marketing agency project?

A CPG brand strategy engagement has to work at shelf speed. Most category purchase decisions happen in seconds in front of a freezer case, so the creative has to carry the brand’s differentiation instantly, not just in a thirty-second video. That is why Agency Squid’s FatBoy work paired a video campaign with packaging language and shopper marketing built for the same platform, so the brand reads the same way on screen and on shelf.

4. What deliverables come from a CPG rebrand engagement with Agency Squid?

A full CPG rebrand engagement with Agency Squid typically includes a brand strategy framework, a verbal identity system, campaign concept development and production, packaging copywriting, and a shopper marketing toolkit for retail partners. Agency Squid, led by co-founders Miles and Brent Marmo out of Minneapolis, has run this scope for CPG and food and beverage brands including FatBoy, Costa Farms, White Claw, and Zesty Paws.