Kyle Sergeant, AVP strategy, right, and Jackson Bergman, lead planner for Mentos at Cossette Media, with the Fizzooka.
Gamers are no longer just teens in their parents’ basements. The gaming community now spans all age demos with 53% of the Canadian population playing games at least some of the time, according to April 2025 data from marketing research company, The Strategic Counsel.
Because of this, Mentos has decided to lean into its legacy association with cola to connect with Canadians and the gaming community across the country.
The result was “Fizzooka,” a virtual launcher that was born out of a 90s fad when teens experimented with putting Mentos into cola to create a fizzy explosion. While the Fizzooka would exist virtually within the Fortnite community as a reward for gamers in their gameplay, Hacksmith, a Cambridge, Ont., research and development company, built an actual metre-long Fizzooka that launched the fizz with the force of a firehose.
Fortnite, which is not an official partner of Mentos, is an open-source platform that allows individuals and brands to build experiences and tools within its environment but does not endorse these executions.
Developed in collaboration with creative agency BBH London and PR agency Apex PR, the Mentos Fizzooka launcher was made available in games across various Fortnite Creative maps.
Cossette Media Canada’s mandate was to bring all that to life and connect with gamers in Canada as part of the Mentos global initiative. The project was led by Jackson Bergman, lead planner for Mentos at Cossette Media, and Kyle Sergeant, AVP strategy.
The campaign ran in March and April of this year. With a bulls-eye target demo of 18 to 34, the goal was to build a relationship and relevance with gamers and demonstrate the brand’s cool factor by highlighting its relationship to the gaming space.
Connecting with gamers was the initial push of the campaign, says Bergman, so places where gamers typically go to connect with other gamers were selected since they crave that community aspect.
“That’s what drove us to Reddit, specifically because Reddit is a social media platform that is broken into its own communities,” Bergman explains. “You can find one specifically for Fortnite, and you can talk to other people who like the same things…We had over a 400% increase in talk about Mentos as the campaign ran, and it created a lot of organic chatter on the platform. We went to Twitch with a takeover, which is the more obvious way to connect with gamers since it’s the largest platform for watching gaming.”
The Fizzooka created a brand explosion of activity for Mentos by generating over 25 million impressions for the brand in three weeks of activity and resulted in a 410% monthly increase in Mentos-related conversations on Reddit. It wasn’t just the gaming community that was talking about the Mentos brand. The Fizzooka was covered from coast-to-coast by 29 news and industry outlets, including Yahoo! Canada, CBC, Metro, CTV and CP24.
To connect to gamers in real life, the campaign appeared at ComiCon Toronto.
The key component was a digital-equipped truck with the Fizzooka image adorning its side that was parked directly in front of the entrance for the entire duration of ComicCon. Ads were also placed along the pathways for accessing the Toronto Convention Centre including a takeover of Union Station and the Sky Walk.
Reaching a wider audience included gaming and lifestyle influencers post on Meta, YouTube and TikTok.
Bergman’s main suggestion for brands wanting to succeed with the gaming space is that it requires specific planning. “If you look to simply show up like you would on other platforms, that could be perceived as inauthentic. You need to understand the communities such as Reddit and Twitch, and use that understanding to inform how you intend to show up within them.”
