Oscar Mayer’s New Ad Campaign Suggests ‘Have Bacon, Will Travel’

How much are fire breathing, fortune telling and couch crashing worth? 35 packs of bacon, apparently.

Granted it’s not just any bacon. No, Oscar Mayer’s new frontman Josh Sankey was only sent out with the good stuff–that is, OM’s new Butcher Thick Cut Applewood Smoked Bacon–normally worth about $9 for your standard 22 ounce package. And it’s probably a good thing, because if he wasn’t, heavens knows his bacon-for-board stunt in this, the most baconed-out, fame-seeking, social media-crazed nation in the world, probably wouldn’t have worked.

The premise is simple: Sankey has two weeks to get from New York to Los Angeles using only a truck and a trailer filled with 3,000 pounds’ worth of pork fat strips. He’s free to trade his dowry as he pleases, having already swindled his way into, among other things, a New York Jets game and most recently, onto the couch of one Dan the firebreather.

Tom Bick, Oscar Mayer’s ad and marketing director, explained: Butcher Thick Cut “is the new gold standard in bacon,” he said, and “worth its weight in gold,” making the whole experiment just a little bit easier to swallow. Still, chances are most of Sankey’s bacon-fiending friends are less about the bacon or even being Good Samaritans and more about the novelty of it all, but with nearly 500 miles of travel behind him already, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s complaining.

The Great American Bacon Barter started last Sunday in New York and will continue until September 23rd in Los Angeles, Calif. You can keep up with Sank’s shenanigans at baconbarter.com and on Facebook and Twitter.

See the initial Bacon Barter challenge video here:

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So we’re dying to ask: what would you trade for a brick of bacon? How about 20 bricks? Or maybe even the whole trailer? Sound off in the comments!