How ‘Hot Ones’ went from YouTube series to a brand of its own

The show with hot questions and even hotter wings has never been more on fire.

The YouTube series Hot Ones, where host Sean Evans interviews celebrities while they eat progressively spicier chicken wings, is now in its 22nd season after beginning in 2015. Over the years, the show has grown not just its cult following, but also its own branded product offerings: It has its own card game, a line of hot sauces, and, within the last year, frozen chicken bites and strips.

Hot Ones has partnered with other brands, too, not just to be featured on the show (like sauce brand Fly by Jing), but to create CPG offerings, like spicy Hot Pockets and limited-edition Pringles. Earlier this month, Panda Express announced its “spiciest dish to date,” a chicken-and-veggie dish with spicy bourbon sauce made in partnership with Hot Ones.

It’s all part of a marketing strategy designed to get Hot Ones in front of lots of viewers and consumers alike, Melanie Kiley-Baker, director of marketing for First We Feast at Complex Networks, which produces Hot Ones, explained. It comes down to a two-pronged approach: using viral collabs to reach consumers out in the world and its own white-label brand to reach them at home.

“We want [people] to see the show, be excited by it, feel a little bullish that they can take it on themselves…and then give them as many opportunities and as many touch points to say, ‘I went out into the world and I was able to try this Hot Ones sauce,’” she said.

Two become one

Kiley-Baker, who oversees partnerships, licensing, and product offerings, said the company’s partnership strategy includes evaluating whether and to what degree two brands’ audiences overlap. Take the brand’s partnership with Hot Pockets, which Kiley-Baker described as a natural fit: “Our demo is over 80% male, there’s a lot of college kids in there, and they love Hot Pockets,” she said.

Sports fans also make up a large chunk of the show’s audience, she said, knowledge that helped inform a partnership with the LA Chargers that includes a spin-off series that just wrapped up its second year.

There’s also the desire to go viral, which Kiley-Baker said gives the brand a chance to win over new consumers as word spreads. A partnership with Shake Shack last year, which included spicy burgers, chicken sandwiches, cheese fries, and bacon cheese fries, led to quite a few viral videos, and the collab ended up being the restaurant’s strongest limited-time offering in 2022, exceeding first-month sales targets (though the chain declined to share exact sales numbers with us).

It’s one thing to spice up an existing product, but it’s another to make a new product from scratch. The brand’s white-label expansion, which began with sauce and now includes chicken, found her tapping into her experience working on in-store marketing at Milk Bar and thinking through an e-commerce perspective.

Even though there are plans to further expand, Kiley-Baker said she is being thoughtful about the kinds of white-label products to explore, and isn’t shy about passing up opportunities that don’t feel quite right.

“We have a lot of inbound opportunities that we say no to just because we want it to really make sense for our fans first,” she explained.

Show and sell

What’s (perhaps unsurprisingly) been the No. 1 marketing stage for Hot Ones products has been the show, which puts hot sauces front and center, Kiley-Baker said. This season, the brand’s newest Buffalo sauce is in the first slot for guests to try, while a new version of its Last Dab sauce is at the end.

“It’s great when we get a celebrity to bite into our Buffalo sauce and they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. I can’t wait to cook with that at home or eat that at home,’” she said. “That’s pure gold.”

The star power of Evans as show host can also help move the marketing needle, and the brand capitalizes on his popularity in various ways, whether it’s channeling his voice in social copy or giving fans the chance to meet him at events like ComplexCon, an annual festival that took place in November in Long Beach, California.

“The Sean endorsement for the true Hot Ones fans, the true Spice Lords, holds an insane amount of weight,” Kiley-Baker said. “When he introduces the hot sauces in our sauce reveal before a new season, when he plugs a new product with an end card at the end of an episode, that’s where we really see that motion toward converting to sales. It’s amazing to see how much of an authority he’s become.”

In addition to giving fans an opportunity to meet Evans, Kiley-Baker said events like ComplexCon can help boost Hot Ones by letting fans try products IRL. That doesn’t just include sauces, but also includes its card game, Truth or Dab, which comes with 250 question cards and a bottle of Last Dab sauce. To promote the game elsewhere, Hot Ones has leaned on food influencers and has encouraged people to post their own videos of them trying Last Dab, Kiley-Baker said.

This summer, the brand tried out a new way to get its products in front of consumers, working with companies like Mealco and Grubhub to bring spicy chicken to customers in NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia. The plan is to expand into other cities soon, with an additional focus on college campuses, where Kiley-Baker said there is a “huge crossover” for the brand.

There can be challenges that come with Hot Ones having as many brand extensions as it does, Kiley-Baker acknowledged, but she said it comes with the territory of operating a beloved brand.

“The reason why we’re able to show up in all of these other places outside of the show is because the fans have galvanized and given us that mandate for more,” she said.