“So we tried to leave behind the idea of boring and serious, and go with delicious and playful,” he said of the television commercial, which has young people gathering in a farmer’s field to create a crop circle, a design seen from the air.

Image Samples of the multigrain Pringles were widely distributed to try to gauge taste concerns.

To familiarize people with its multigrain version, Pringles has been distributing samples, giving out more than two million  individual chips, not entire cans  said Kay Puryear, a brand spokeswoman. Samples and coupons for a tube of multigrain Pringles were distributed in grocery stores nationwide, at concerts and festivals in several cities, and at Grand Central Terminal in New York.

Mr. Bergsma said that the multigrain Pringles campaign was devised to appeal to people 35 and older, a group that tends to be more aware of calories and sodium content and that also looks to keep the pounds off with whole grains. (Even so, multigrain Pringles, which are made from rice, corn, wheat and black beans in addition to dehydrated potatoes, have about the same amount of sodium and calories as regular Pringles.)

Pringles, Mr. Bergsma said, also is aiming at 18- to 28-year-olds. That age group, according to Mintel, a market research company based in Chicago, shows marked interest in trying healthier snacks. Three-fourths of people in that age group, Mintel’s 2009 research found, wanted healthier snack fare.

Pringles is the sole remaining major food brand owned by Procter & Gamble, which has sold food lines like Folgers coffee, and it has consistently added to its flavors. Loaded Baked Potato and Bacon Ranch are included in the lineup. The company also offers a fat-free version, introduced in 1998, and reduced fat version, introduced in 1981.

(In fact, Pringles, including the new product, are officially named crisps rather than chips in response to the 1975 Food and Drug Administration edict that their composition required any labeling to spell out that it is “a potato chip made from dried potatoes.”)

Those, along with multigrain, join a field dominated thus far by SunChips, a multigrain chip from Frito-Lay, which has benefited from rekindled interest in healthier snacks. From 2005 to 2009, sales of healthier snacks rose 8 percent, according to a report last year on the snack industry by Information Resources, the research group now called the SymphonyIRI Group.