The death of Mr. Peanut in a Super Bowl ad was inspired by the demise of Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame. Planters snack food company first introduced the Mr. Peanut logo way back in 1916, based on a design originally submitted by schoolboy Antonio Gentile as part of a contest. Over the decades, the character’s look including top hat, monocle and cane became iconic in the world of brand logos.

But in today’s universe of viral marketing, it takes more than just an iconic logo to distinguish a brand, which is why last week Planters made the shocking move to kill off the 104-year-old Mr. Peanut. The company kicked off their campaign with a bizarre ad showing Mr. Peanut sacrificing himself to save actors Matt Walsh and Wesley Snipes after an accident in a peanut-shaped vehicle, and social media took over from there with an #RIPeanut hashtag meant to stoke the viral fires ahead of Mr. Peanut’s actual funeral during the Super Bowl. However, plans to turn the demise of fictional Mr. Peanut into a viral Super Bowl sensation have been put on hold after the tragic death of basketball star Kobe Bryant in a weekend helicopter crash.

Even before the #RIPeanut campaign was suspended in the wake of real life tragedy, many questioned the tastefulness of the entire idea. Now some light has been shed on what inspired the dubious campaign in the first place. Speaking to MSN, Mike Pierantozzi, Group Creative Director at VaynerMedia, the ad agency that handled Planters’ campaign, revealed that worldwide reaction to the death of Iron Man in Endgame originally sparked the idea that led to Mr. Peanut’s demise:

Indeed, the death of Tony Stark via an act of supreme self-sacrifice in Endgame was met with massive and genuinely emotional reaction the world over. Of course, Tony Stark as a fictional character had been fleshed out over the course of multiple MCU movies leading up to his dramatic final moments in Endgame, and over all those years fans had developed a real connection to him and the other members of The Avengers.

“We started talking about how the internet treats when someone dies — specifically, we were thinking about fictional characters, [like when] Iron Man died. When Iron Man died, we saw an incredible reaction on Twitter and on social media. It’s such a strange phenomenon. We did the unthinkable: we created a program and an idea where Mr. Peanut dies, and dies specifically sacrificing himself for his friends, which has always been a tenet of who he is and what he does — he always puts others first.”

Though Mr. Peanut has obviously been an iconic logo for many decades, the general public certainly does not feel the same connection to the character that they felt toward the fully-realized figure of Tony Stark, a charismatic and complex hero at the center of a hugely popular series of films. Indeed, the death of Mr. Peanut was met mostly with perplexity rather than grief, a situation not helped by the overtly comedic tone of the Mr. Peanut death commercial.

Avengers: Endgame may itself have been comedic at times, but the deaths of characters had weight and fans truly felt the loss of these fictional people, who had been made to feel real over the course of multiple films. Ultimately, Mr. Peanut’s death felt more like mockery of the notion of mourning fictional characters than anything, and the fact that the whole idea was inspired by Iron Man’s demise only adds an extra layer of weirdness to the entire affair. At the end of the day, the whole Mr. Peanut campaign felt ill-conceived and borderline tasteless, and it’s probably best that Planters was forced by circumstance to put things on hold rather than pay off their goofy viral scheme with what would have likely been a deeply unfunny fake funeral.

More: Here’s Who’s Playing In The 2020 Super Bowl

Source: MSN

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