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Don MacLeod

22,000+ Wake-Ups Into This Lifetime

Why Flipz’s Latest Stunt Actually Works

Posted on January 12, 2026January 12, 2026 By Don MacLeod

It has been a long time since I’ve watched a brand stunt and thought, yes, that’s the whole thing—and that’s enough.

Flipz decided that “coin toss” is the wrong phrase. Not morally wrong. Not politically wrong. Just inaccurate. Coins flip. Tossing is incidental.

So they did what only a snack brand obsessed with flipping would do: launched a petition to officially change the term from coin toss to coin flip. They called themselves the Unofficial Sponsor of the Coin Flip and partnered with Kyle Juszczyk and Kristin Juszczyk, two people whose public story is already built around the idea of flipping expectations.

That’s the stunt. There isn’t a second layer hiding behind it. No manifesto. No “starting a conversation.” Just a clean, literal extension of what the brand already claims to care about: game day snacking and things that flip.

That restraint is what makes it funny.

I’ve done a boatload of stunts over the years, and most of the ones that fail do so for the same reason: they can’t stop explaining themselves. They swell. They hedge. They try to turn a single joke into a movement, and the audience feels the effort immediately.

Flipz doesn’t do that here. They pick a word. They stay on it. They don’t apologize for how small the idea is.

That’s rarer than it sounds.

There’s a long tradition of stunts that work because they’re committed to one narrow lane. And there’s an equally long tradition of stunts that live on precisely because they didn’t. The most famous example is fictional but instructive: the turkey drop from WKRP in Cincinnati, where a radio station’s Thanksgiving promotion involved live turkeys dropped from a helicopter.

“I thought turkeys could fly.”

I actually recreated that stunt years later with Richard Sanders, who played Les Nessman. Even knowing it was a joke, even knowing it was absurd, the bit only worked because it went all the way. No winking. No safety net. Total belief in a bad idea.

That’s the connective tissue between the good stunts and the memorable failures: commitment. Not scale. Not budget. Not how loudly you announce it.

Most modern brand stunts fail because they’re afraid to look dumb in a specific way, so they settle for being vaguely clever instead. They smooth the edges. They add disclaimers. They explain the joke until it evaporates.

Flipz doesn’t do that. They don’t say this is important. They don’t say it’s changing culture. They just point at something everyone has heard a thousand times and say, “Actually, no. It’s this.”

And then they stop.

That’s the discipline most brands no longer have. The discipline to stay small. To let the audience finish the thought. To trust that if the idea is clean enough, it doesn’t need scaffolding.

The coin flip has always been there. Flipz just noticed it, named it, and refused to let go.

Bravo.

Brands Business MacLeod Marketing advertisingbrand stuntsbrand voicecoin flipcultural momentsexperiential marketingFlipzsports marketingWKRP turkey drop

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