Creative Q&A: The mojo behind Duke’s ‘mayo dump’
Richmond Bizsense | February 3, 2025
By Jonathan Spiers
When hip-hop hype man Flavor Flav was revealed to be the Tubby mascot at this year’s Duke’s Mayo Bowl – and then commenced with the tradition of dumping a tub of mayonnaise on the winning football team’s coach – the media moment that resulted was the successful culmination of months of work by Richmond ad firm Familiar Creatures.
The 11-person shop had set out to top the buzz from the previous year’s Pop-Tarts Bowl, which drew significant media coverage with its Pop-Tart mascot getting lowered into a giant toaster and then eaten by the winning team. The publicity stunt went viral and was brought back for this year’s game.
Granted, the so-called “mayo dump” had drawn comparable attention for the Duke’s Mayo Bowl since it started doing it four years ago. But Familiar Creatures, which has led Duke’s marketing since after the first dump, wanted to add a new element to create a media moment that could top Pop-Tarts’.
The “Tubby Time” campaign was a high note for Familiar Creatures, which co-founders and creative directors Dustin Artz and Justin Bajan launched in 2018 after stints at larger agencies including The Martin Agency, where they worked on GEICO Gecko ads together. The past two years, Familiar Creatures has landed twice on BizSense’s RVA 25 list of the fastest-growing businesses in Richmond.
Artz and Bajan sat down with BizSense to discuss the agency’s Duke’s Mayo mojo with Tubby Time team members Sarah Carr, Carey Ely and Ben Englander. The following is an edited transcript:
Richmond BizSense: How did the Tubby Time campaign come about? What was your approach to adding something new for the Mayo Bowl?
Dustin Artz: The first year – we had not yet been working with Duke’s – something happened where the team that won accidentally dropped the trophy for the Mayo Bowl and it shattered. It was kind of serendipitous for Duke’s because the quarterback at the time taped a little jar of Duke’s to the trophy, and it went viral. The team at Duke’s ran with it…and from then on, it was how do we make a moment out of every Duke’s Mayo Bowl, so every year we try to elevate it.
Carey Ely: One of the biggest things is, when you look back at the Pop-Tarts Bowl last year, it was the headline everywhere: They ate the mascot. It was a big deal. Duke’s Mayo Bowl wants to be the most ridiculous college bowl game, so to make that happen, we’re like, “Well, how do we beat the Pop-Tarts Bowl? They’ve eaten their mascot; what could we do that one-ups, that gets us in the press, that gets people talking about Duke’s and puts them in that same realm?
We didn’t know what Pop-Tarts was going to do (this year). I had seen the woman from Kellanova (Pop-Tarts’ parent company) speak about it, and she’s like, “It’s more important what you do afterwards; we have to come back even harder.” …That was the brief, basically, to the creative teams: How do you outdo whatever may be coming down the pipe from Pop-Tarts.
RBS: How did you end up deciding on a celebrity reveal with Tubby?
Sarah Carr: It took a ton of ideas to end up landing on that one. We talked about all the things Tubby could do, all the ridiculous stunts he could do. For the Tubby Time idea we landed on, it was, “Okay, what if we think about what’s in Tubby?” You don’t see a mascot revealed the way that we did. Could we really shock people with who’s inside? How could we really have fun with it?
Ben Englander: That was a lot of the back and forth: How do we bring it to life in the best way possible without it getting complex and without it being some weird afterthought moment. Putting it next to the mayo dump and having it all be in the same thing was really key to getting as much attention and spectacle as possible.
RBS: How did you land on Flavor Flav? I understand Justin’s a big fan.
Justin Bajan: He gave me two nicknames right away; it was the best day of my life (mimics Flavor Flav): “Justin Time! Justin Case!”
Artz: It didn’t start out as Flavor Flav. There’s a process where we were like, this could be anyone, these are our shortlist, but then you have to go through all of the representation and management of all these people. You have to get dollar numbers, you have to figure out the charities they want to give to. You have to see if they actually want to be in a costume that looks like a mayo jar.
Flavor Flav loved mayo, so we loved that about the fit. Because you don’t want it to just be like, “It’s Tom Hanks!” Which, we would probably do Tom Hanks, but it’s like, why?
Ely: He also was the perfect height. He was the perfect size to go in there. He’s the perfect hype man.
Carr: And the name, Flavor Flav, worked out as this great cherry on top.
RBS: I assume Flavor Flav was not in Tubby the entire game?
Artz: Mentally he was.
Englander: And continues to be!
RBS: Were you all nervous wrecks as it was playing out on live TV?
Artz: In the very beginning, we were like, “What if they don’t even know who this celebrity is?” It was all very under wraps, because we didn’t want to tease it. We wanted it to just be very pure. But part of that is like what if the coach would have been like, “What’s going on?”
Bajan: With anything that we do, there’s a lot of planning and strategy. When we’re making a commercial, there’s all these different phases. One of those phases is pre-production.…We had storyboards, because without that, people are like, “What’s going on? When?” Then it’s 11:47, and it almost all goes out the window. We’re like, “We’re here, we’re in the right place; do the thing, everyone!”
What took away some of the nerves is the partnership that we’ve been growing with Charlotte Sports Foundation. They were so on board, and Bespoke (Duke’s Mayo Bowl’s sports marketing agency). They were not going to let it fail.
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