Wonderful Pistachios is bringing Josh Allen back for a second year, with a new campaign set to debut Oct. 12 during Monday Night Football when the Buffalo Bills play the Los Angeles Rams. The brand is using the national game window to push a fresh set of ads built around Allen’s farming background and his place as the face of its “The Don’t Hold Back Snack” effort.
The campaign includes two commercials, “Tackle Sled” and “Resistance Bands.” In one, a teammate stuffs himself inside a training sled to avoid snacking; in the other, another teammate straps himself to a wall to stay away from a bag of pistachios. Allen said he was happy to be back with Wonderful Pistachios because the brand keeps finding new ways to have fun with the farmer side of his life, and that he gets to eat pistachios, make funny commercials and remind people he knows his way around a pistachio orchard.
That farming tie is the reason the campaign keeps landing. Wonderful Pistachios says Allen’s family owns a farm that grows pistachios sold to the brand, giving the ads a hook that goes beyond standard football endorsement work. Michael Perdigao said that while Allen is known to most as an NFL superstar and MVP quarterback, the company also celebrates his work off the field as a pistachio farmer, adding that the on-screen disclosure in the ads notes that he really owns a pistachio farm.
The campaign is more than a pair of spots. It will run through the football season and includes behind-the-scenes social content, Instagram giveaways with signed jerseys, footballs and a bobblehead showing Allen on a tractor, plus launch-night activations at select Bills Backers bars in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver and Rochester, New York. Fans at those locations can receive complimentary bags of pistachios, with the total number determined by the number of participating bars rather than a fixed allotment per city.
The new push also builds on a product already in stores: a limited-edition Josh Allen package of the brand’s 16-ounce Roasted & Salted In-Shell Pistachios that launched earlier this season. It also sits alongside the renewed Josh Allen Scholarship, which supports students in Firebaugh, California, and can provide up to $12,000 over four years of college. The pitch is simple enough for a prime-time ad buy and specific enough to survive it: Allen is still the Bills quarterback, but Wonderful Pistachios is betting that the farm story is what makes the campaign stick.
