Key Takeaways
• Creative Brand Integration: Slim Jim has partnered with WWE to sponsor all folding tables used in matches, cleverly aligning its iconic “Snap Into a Slim Jim” slogan by associating the brand with the visual of tables being snapped in half.
• High-Visibility Marketing: With WWE’s massive audience – millions of viewers on Netflix and thousands attending live events – Slim Jim gains significant brand exposure through this unique sponsorship.
• Experiential Marketing Innovation: This campaign goes beyond traditional logo placement by creating a memorable physical interaction between the product’s identity and the wrestling environment, enhancing brand engagement.
“Snap Into a Slim Jim” is an instantly recognizable slogan. When you hear it, you imagine taking the stick of beef jerky in two hands and snapping it in half. It’s a simple tag line, but it evokes so much.
Slim Jim didn’t need much help in that mind’s-eye exercise, but just in case potential customers needed another visual aid, the brand is now the official sponsor of all folding tables in WWE wrestling matches.
You know, the ones that frequently get snapped in half.
Starting this week, Slim Jim will not only sponsor the center of the WWE ring (a notable promotional print product in itself) but will place its logo on all folding tables used for WWE’s proprietary Raw, Smackdown, NXT and premium live events, something the brand calls a “first-of-its-kind integration.”
“Extending our partnership during Monday Night Raw will give us even more opportunities to create unique and memorable experiences that tap into the rich history and savage energy of both Slim Jim and WWE,” said Ashley Spade, vice president and general manager of snacks at Conagra Brands, in a press release.
On the surface, this is silly because professional wrestling is, at its core, pretty silly. But it’s also wildly popular. According to USA Today, the first episode of Monday Night Raw to be streamed on Netflix this year drew 4.9 million global views, averaging 2.6 million households in the U.S. That’s up from the average 1.2 million households from when the show was streamed on USA Network in 2024. In person, the show draws an average of 10,000 attendees per event.
So, there are clearly eyes on the Slim Jim logo each night the show airs. That simple fact of putting a logo in front of an audience is just one obvious facet of this deal that makes sense.
The other is creating brand interaction with the Slim Jim logo in a way that quite literally relates to the brand. Each table broken beneath the weight of a finishing move will make people think of opening a Slim Jim bar and snapping it in half just like “Macho Man” Randy Savage did in the commercial all of those years ago.
What this does is take the idea of experiential marketing and brand engagement and bring it to a traditional print and promo arena, for lack of a better word. A table is a great flat surface for a logo to be printed onto. Sporting events are at the top of the list for logo visibility. But in the case of the Slim Jim WWE sponsorship, just giving that little bit of extra thought beyond just putting the logo at the center of the ring, a spot at which plenty of marketing executives would stop and rightfully so, brings this from a good promotional idea to a great one.
So, for a distributor looking to do something similar, look at your customers’ products and services. How can that part of their brand identity be expressed through a product or brand placement? How can people engage with the brand in a way beyond just seeing it? How can you evoke something beyond just name recognition through the promo and branding location itself?
Slim Jim went the body slam route, but yours can be much less violent.
