Cheetos used to play it safe.
For years, they peddled their wares behind slogans like "The cheese that goes crunch!" and "It ain't easy bein' cheesy." Before long, though, "Dangerously cheesy" came to represent the brand, and this ethos would dominate the image of the beloved crunchy snack. But crucially, Frito-Lay executives never anticipated that Chester Cheetah would come to embody this slogan quite so literally.
2008 was a year of massive global change. Facebook and Twitter were rapidly becoming household names, overtaking former behemoths like MySpace and Friendster. Greed and speculation sent global markets into a tailspin, causing the world’s financial system to come nearly undone. Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president began a new chapter of American history, sending ripples through world politics that are still being felt today.
But the most indelible marker of 2008 was not technological, not financial, not geopolitical. No, it was highly processed, halfway edible, and entirely cheesy. It was Cheetos.
2008 was the year Cheetos took its bad boy turn. Forget everything you thought you knew about snack food and prepare to have your world turned upside down. Things are about to get dangerously cheesy.
A cat and mouse game
Before there was Chester Cheetah, there was the Cheetos Mouse. He did not have a name. He was just a mouse.
Hail Chee-sar, indeed. The Cheetos Mouse has been described as “debonair and multitalented,” among other things. And while his reign at the top of the puffed corn-cheese empire is not widely remembered today, those whose lives he touched were deeply impacted. Here’s an excerpt from a book written by a copywriter who worked on the Cheetos Mouse commercials, an experience that seems to have taken a significant toll:
After all this, I can only imagine the Mouse’s usurping by Chester Cheetah caused our dear copywriter to have an aneurysm. As the 1970s came to a close, the Cheetos Mouse would go the way of disco and bell-bottom jeans. New trends would rise to the surface, and before long, so too would new snack food mascots.
Fast forward to 1986 – the world was grappling with the back-to-back disasters of the Space Shuttle Challenger and the Chernobyl nuclear plant within three months of each other, yet finding hope and meaning with the previous year’s unanimously-praised Pepsi jingle “We Are the World” as Halley’s comet blazed past the Earth for a once-in-a-generation visit. It was in this cultural context that Chester Cheetah was born.
At first, Chester Cheetah was pretty normal, at least as far as snack food mascots go. He mostly just rhymed a lot and got himself implicated in all manner of cartoon violence as a “cool daddio rockin’ on the patio” while conspiring to steal other people’s Cheetos. All normal snack food mascot stuff.
During this era, Frito-Lay’s focus was primarily on the youth market, as evidenced by its heavy usage of bright colors, the aforementioned gratuitous rhyming, the lab-grade snazziness of Chester’s general demeanor, and the insistence that Cheetos products brought “big fun to young tongues” (dislike, unsubscribe, no thank you, hate that so much).
Chester also tried his hand at video games during this time. 1994’s Chester Cheetah: Wild Wild Quest saw Super NES and Sega Genesis players traversing the U.S. after breaking out of a zoo, and dying after a single hit by an enemy unless they had a Cheeto in hand. The game received such laudatory reviews as “all parties involved should be ashamed of themselves” and “some of the most shallow gameplay I’ve ever seen in a platformer” and “I'd almost recommend you try it out just to see how bad gaming can get … I debased myself by playing this.”
Feel free to check it out for yourself!
Clearly, Chester Cheetah had risen to the top of the hierarchy of children’s snack food mascots. But this culinary ascendancy, this dominance of the youthful tastebuds of America – it was not enough for Chester. His appetite for acclaim was insatiable. He hungered for the adulation of adults, too. Chester wanted it all.
“A global movement bent on social un-domination”
In 2007, Frito-Lay did something that would have once seemed unthinkable – they decided to stop advertising to young children. As a new signatory to the Children’s Food & Beverage Advertising Initiative, the company voluntarily committed not to market (most of) its products to kids younger than 12. (They were still free to market their “better-for-you products” to young kids, with “Baked Flamin Hot Cheetos®” given as a specific example.)
This represented a sea change in the overall marketing strategy for Cheetos. Up to now, they had seen kids under 12 as their most important audience, but they would now be forced to shift their focus to an older demographic. Gone were the days of commercials during children’s cartoons, and taking their place was … well, that was the question, really – how would they advertise to adults, anyway?
Cheetos got to work conducting detailed neuromarketing research to determine what, specifically, appealed to customers so much when they snacked on Cheetos. Was it the color, the smell, the texture?
Brain scans of consumers and focus groups with “heavy users of Cheetos” revealed an intriguing finding: the residual orange coating of Cheetos dust left on their fingers (officially known as “Cheetle”) triggered “a sense of giddy subversion that consumers enjoy over the messiness of the product.”
Further research showed that Cheetos helped people find “moments of escape,” and that the snack food inspired in them a desire for “mischief” and “permission to not act their age and not conform to expectations of ‘adult behavior.’” As the report proudly proclaims, “Cheetos snacks let them do that.”
With these revelations in hand, the marketing masterminds of Frito-Lay asked themselves, “How can we channel this desire for messiness and disorder into an effective media strategy? What is the 18-45 demographic looking for in a snack food?” And through some inexplicable combination of consumer analysis and highly speculative marketing logic, the answer they came up with was an anarchist revolt against the very pillars of society.
Loves eating Cheetos → Loves getting messy → Loves anarchy?
To capture the adult demographic, Cheetos rolled out the “Orange Underground” campaign, which encouraged people to use Cheetos to commit mischievous acts against others, like ruining their laundry or sticking Cheetos up their nose while asleep or, for some reason, messing with their workspace for being too tidy.
The Orange Underground dared people to buck social norms and let their devious inner selves shine through, as manifested through the troublesome and occasionally illegal use of Cheetos as a tool. In television commercials, Chester appeared as a sort of devil on the shoulder, seen only by the Cheeto-armed troublemaker, with no counterbalancing angel in sight. Chester was “the mascot for a latent underground movement of adults aching to fight back against being ‘all grown-up.’”
Focus groups hated these ads, dismissing them as too mean-spirited. But brain scans and facial coding research showed that people liked the ads more than they let on, suggesting that some focus group members were only feigning dislike so as not to come off as mean-spirited themselves.
Or, as Gizmodo put it: “people didn’t want to admit that they liked a commercial about an asshole who flouts social norms.”
To put it lightly, this was a very weird campaign. The Orange Underground ads “aired only at night on channels like TBS and Comedy Central,” and Cheetos seemingly hired someone to astroturf the very limited presence that the Orange Underground had in the blogosphere. I managed to find an old Blogspot account for the Orange Underground that included such messaging as this:
“The ‘60s were a blast. But they ain’t got nothing on what’s to come.”
“...the Orange Underground is committed to transforming sterile order into messy mayhem.”
Much of the rhetoric used to promote the Orange Underground closely echoed that of anarchist movements throughout history. And while some of this could be chalked up to pure coincidence, other campaign materials drew explicit parallels to violent anti-establishment causes.
One of the ads (second video on this page) includes a brief segment that shows the below still, which is an unmistakable reference to The Anarchist Cookbook (also included for reference).
Cheetos, in their infinite wisdom, decided the best way to get more adults to buy their product was to make very on-the-nose allusions to a book containing instructions on how to make explosives, LSD, and tear gas, among other things (and which is illegal to possess “without reasonable excuse” in the UK).
(Side note: Through some genuine miracle, I found an archived page from 2009 that still had a working download link for the Orange Underground’s anarchist cookbook. The PDF is available for download at the bottom of this post.)
Reactions to the Orange Underground were mixed. Some loved the bold new direction of the ads:
Others were not so enthused, such as this user from an Iowa State Cyclones fan forum:
Some even went beyond disinterest, expressing shock at the campaign’s tone:
And an article in Ad Age heaped criticism:
Remember the acronym "RAoC." It will be useful when the lawsuits start coming in. … What should we think when a leading national advertiser borrows a marketing strategy from the drug trade? Here's an answer: It's cynical and disgusting. … there is another word for Random Acts of Cheetos: vandalism. The Cheetos Underground explicitly incites its shadowy network of crap eaters not only to perpetrate mischief but to document their petty crimes on video for the Cheetos website. … Can you see how this is all destined to lead to litigation? Or worse? Can you see how ethically bankrupt it is -- Frito-Lay in the role of Ken Lay?
To answer your question: Yes, they did, in fact, just compare the ethics of the Cheetos marketing strategy to the disgraced former CEO of Enron.
Was the Orange Underground a bold and exciting new take on movement-based advertising in a world of too-sterile commercials? Or was it an irresponsibly subversive dance with extremist elements in a misguided and overzealous attempt to sell Cheetos?
Given the lack of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Chester Cheetah, I think it’s safe to say it’s the former. At its core, the Orange Underground was just a very of-its-era attempt to harness the growing power of social media to drive interest towards a product.
To be perfectly honest, I think these ads were way ahead of their time. The people of 2025 would love it if Chester Cheetah implicitly signed off on a book that taught people how to properly manufacture and throw Molotov cocktails. I think people would absolutely commit acts of terrorism in the name of Cheetos.
And this wasn’t the end of unconventional marketing decisions for Cheetos either. After the Orange Underground, Frito-Lay sponsored seven blogs to create pro-Cheetos posts and refused any creative control over the actual content of the posts. Said one of the blog execs: “We were prepared to show them the blog posts beforehand, but they didn't want to see them. Cheetos was insistent that it be the voice of the blog."
They also sponsored an original web series in a partnership with Ashton Kutcher’s production company at a time when the web series as a medium was beginning to gain serious attention.
However, there were also some downsides to this decentralized approach, as Cheetos discovered firsthand. I happened across this Orange Underground ad posted by an account called “ChestersFeed,” which was also the name of an image board hosted by Cheetos during this time. We can’t know for sure whether this was an official Cheetos account or just an especially enthusiastic fan, but my instinct (well-honed after many hours of researching the Cheetos marketing strategy of the late 2000s) tells me that this was an official account. I would put my confidence level at 90%.
Anyway, I say all this to set the scene for what I found when I looked at what else this channel has posted. There are five videos total, two of which are Orange Underground ads. But the other three are videos titled “Older Women Seducing Young Teen College Boys,” each showing short snippets of what are presumably the beginnings of porn videos.
So, let me reiterate: I’m about 90% sure this was an official Cheetos account, which means there’s about a 90% chance that someone hired by Cheetos for their online marketing efforts also accidentally(?) uploaded MILF porn to the official Cheetos account instead of their personal account.
If you’re skeptical due to the amateurish appearance of this YouTube channel, remember that this was 2010 YouTube – that’s just how things looked back then. This is absolutely par for the course for the official page of a company, especially one that has a demonstrated track record of nontraditional marketing strategies.
So did the MILF porn anarchist rhetoric marketing campaign work?
Accidental MILF porn aside, was the pro-anarchy marketing strategy employed by Cheetos in the late 2000s effective?
Unequivocally yes – more than being successful, the campaign exceeded expectations. Cheetos sales rose 11.3%, nearly doubling the target figure, and Cheetos boasted an impressive 1,000% increase in Google searches over the course of a year. The campaign also won a top industry award for excellence in research-driven advertising.
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However, I did find one outlier who, for unfortunate and highly coincidental reasons, actually had a very bad experience with the Orange Underground campaign. As you may recall, one of the ads depicted Cheetos-related subversive behavior in a laundromat. This was the highest-testing ad of the whole campaign, so it was very recognizable to TV viewers. One night, the ad seemingly came on a viewer’s TV screen, but instead of witnessing the loveable-yet-mischievous behavior of Chester Cheetah and his loyal adherents, the viewer saw “a violent attacker run into a laundromat and rob innocent bystanders,” coming very close to assaulting a mother and her baby.
So what happened here? Well, as it turns out, a laundromat-based anti-meth PSA was running at the same time as the Orange Underground campaign, causing this viewer great confusion when a meth addict appeared on screen instead of Chester Cheetah. At least one unsuspecting consumer got meth when they were expecting Cheetos. A most unfortunate coincidence for Frito-Lay.
The Orange Underground today
Much like Cheetos themselves, the Orange Underground would eventually crunch and crumble, leaving only dust in its wake.
OrangeUnderground.com is, unsurprisingly, not an active website anymore. I tried to access it on the Wayback Machine and kept getting this endless loop of a rotating Cheeto but eventually found some other stuff on the timeline (content warning: Cheetos in a meatloaf).
The campaign labeled by Buzzfeed as “[p]art Dharma initiative, part Fight Club, and part guerrilla terrorist cell” lives on only in the fading cultural memory of its existence and in difficult-to-track-down links scattered across the web.
But the legacy of the Orange Underground is not dead. Far from it – the orange-dusted spirit of rebellion lives on through the vast library of amateur Cheetos videos still hosted today on the campaign’s official YouTube account.
You see, as part of the campaign, Cheetos encouraged consumers to upload their own videos of Cheetos-related mischief and miscellany, and oh boy did Cheetos lovers take them up on that offer.
Beyond the campaign’s official videos, which assert, among other things, “We’re about to carry out a multi-tiered attack on society,” you’ll find here a playlist of 98 surviving videos uploaded by various users, showing off their Cheetos-based skits, pranks, songs, and more.
I watched every single video in one sitting. Here are the best ones:
“It was a pretty exciting moment and I thought I’d share it with the world” (Cheetos Penis)
Night of the Living Cheetos (this one, incredibly, also features a Molotov cocktail, so it seems they read both the Cheeto and non-Cheeto versions of The Anarchist Cookbook)
And the award for my least favorite goes to this one, where two separate guys eat Cheetos off a real gas station floor.
Thank you for joining me on this very silly adventure through Cheetos history – our history. It’s always a joy to research something that keeps getting more and more bizarre with every new thread you follow, so I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
As mentioned earlier, the Cheetos-ified Anarchist Cookbook is available for download below, along with a fascinating analysis of the Orange Underground campaign.
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So that's where our current Orange Cheeto got his initial campaign plan?? Only in America.
Beginning to have my doubts about this "Freedom of Speech" thing. A passport to Bizarro World.
This is top tier! Truly insane marketing.
Also if I may offer a pointless fact, relating to the reference of the dharma initiative - Adam Leadbeater (voice of Chester cheetah at the time) was in an episode of Lost as a cop. So there's that.