Behind the Campaign: KATSEYE & Hershey’s Pinky Up Moment
Discover how Hershey’s leveraged KATSEYE’s viral “Pinky Up” trend for their new Creme Bars in a masterclass of Gen Z marketing and cultural momentum.
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On paper, Hershey’s Creme Bars are a straightforward line extension: milk chocolate wrapped around Salted Caramel and Affogato filling, sold in a standard bar and a snack-size pouch. The actual strategy sits one layer up. Hershey’s isn’t just launching a flavor, it’s launching it inside a cultural moment it didn’t build on its own, embracing the momentum of global girl group KATSEYE and the song that’s defined their year, in a bet that a 130-year-old candy brand can still move at the speed of a fandom.
A Gesture With Five Months of Built-In Reach
“Pinky Up,” KATSEYE’s lead single off their EP “Wild,” dropped April 9 and has spent the months since turning a single raised finger into shorthand for the group’s whole identity. The song’s hashtag has racked up more than 18 million posts on TikTok, spawning its own genre of dance clips, makeup tutorials and style guides, and the group previewed it ahead of a Coachella set, the kind of rollout built for exactly the sustained, multi-platform virality Hershey’s is now stepping into. That’s the asset Hershey’s actually bought into: not a celebrity face for a 30-second spot, but a gesture its target audience was already re-creating on their own, at scale, for free, months before a chocolate bar entered the picture. Any Gen Z consumer scrolling past the campaign has likely already thrown a pinky up on their own For You Page, unprompted, which is exactly the point.
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That distinction shapes how the campaign is built. Rather than asking KATSEYE to endorse a product, Hershey’s is asking consumers to fold a bar of chocolate into a gesture they already know. “We’ve teamed up with Hershey’s to always find joy in the little moments, whether we’re traveling, rehearsing, or spending time together,” the group said. “We love that Hershey’s Creme Bars make those moments feel a little more fun. The partnership felt natural because it’s about celebrating your individuality, embracing your own style, and finding happiness in the things that make you feel most like yourself.” It’s a description of the partnership that barely mentions the product, which is precisely the point: the chocolate is meant to slot into a lifestyle signal that already exists, not compete with it.
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Why KATSEYE, Specifically
For a brand the size of Hershey’s, picking a viral moment is the easy part. Getting the execution right is the harder one. A misjudged celebrity tie-in reads as try-hard within minutes, and a fandom as online and devoted as KATSEYE’s would be the first to notice. In an exclusive comment to Business by LA Times Studios, Katrina Vatter, senior brand manager at The Hershey Company, said the group’s specific appeal was how little the collaboration had to be engineered to work. “One thing we loved about KATSEYE was their ability to make a big creative idea feel effortless and fun,” she said. “The campaign is intentionally playful, but it also reflects how we think about Creme Bars as a product that’s meant to turn an ordinary moment into something a little more memorable. KATSEYE brought that energy to life in a way that felt genuine to who they are and what fans love about them.” That’s a brand-safety calculation as much as a creative one: authenticity has become the actual currency Gen Z consumers trade in, and a partnership that reads as manufactured can undo the exact cultural credibility a brand is hoping to share in.
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Extending a Platform, Not Just a Flavor
The launch also tests how much elasticity Hershey’s “It’s Your Happy Place” platform still has left. Introduced as a broad emotional positioning rather than a product pitch, the platform gives Hershey’s room to attach almost any cultural moment to the brand, as long as the through-line is individual, everyday happiness. “This Hershey’s Creme Bar launch is more than introducing a new chocolate bar,” Vatter said. “It’s about celebrating the small choices that help people express themselves and create moments of happiness throughout their day. From the trend-forward flavors to our partnership with KATSEYE, Hershey’s Creme Bars were designed to inspire discovery, self-expression, and shareable moments that feel uniquely your own.” For a company generating more than $11.7 billion in annual revenue across a portfolio that already includes Reese’s, Kit Kat and Jolly Rancher, a new creme-filled bar alone is a modest bet. Attaching it to a platform elastic enough to absorb a K-pop-adjacent fandom is the more interesting one, a proof point for investors and competitors alike on how far the brand’s positioning can stretch without snapping back to feeling corporate.
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Distribution Built for Discovery, Not Just Sales
The go-to-market plan reads less like a traditional launch calendar and more like an attempt to intercept people mid-moment. Hershey’s is running sampling and pop-up activations this fall rather than leaning solely on shelf placement, and it has paired the launch with Uber around unspecified “select cultural moments,” a bet that the bar sells better in the fifteen minutes before a concert or a night out than it does sitting in a pantry. Both moves chase the same idea: don’t wait for someone to reach for chocolate at the grocery store, put the product in front of them at the exact moment they’re already primed to associate a treat with a shared, social experience. It’s a more expensive, more logistically complex rollout than a straight retail launch, and the payoff depends entirely on whether the KATSEYE association still feels current when consumers actually encounter it in the wild.
That timing is really the bet underneath an otherwise well-built campaign. Hershey’s is plugging into cultural momentum instead of manufacturing its own, which lets the brand move at the speed of culture rather than the speed of a traditional ad cycle, but it also means the moment’s staying power is shared rather than fully within Hershey’s control. “Pinky Up” broke in the spring; the bars reach shelves in September, several months into the song’s life. Hershey’s is wagering that KATSEYE’s fandom is durable rather than seasonal, the kind of devotion that carries a gesture forward instead of letting it go cold, and that the brand can still ride it convincingly months after the sound first broke through. It’s a confident bet, and if the sampling events and Uber tie-ins land the way they’re designed to, expect other legacy brands to start studying exactly this playbook instead of paying for a celebrity face and hoping the culture catches up on its own.
The bigger story here isn’t really about chocolate. It’s a preview of how brands with decades of shelf presence are learning to compete for attention against companies with none: not by out-advertising a fandom, but by embedding a product inside a moment that fandom already owns. That’s a materially different marketing budget than a traditional celebrity endorsement, one weighted toward experiential spend, like sampling, pop-ups and rideshare tie-ins, instead of media buys, and it treats a song’s TikTok lifespan as a more reliable growth signal than a traditional ad flight. For a category as mature as chocolate, where new occasions to eat the product matter more than new reasons to believe in it, that’s a genuinely smart case study, regardless of how long the pinky stays up.
