The Campaign

Branded content and entertainment is a dynamic, growing area in Australia as brands look for more innovative opportunities to connect with their audiences outside of traditional advertising. Product placement/integration in top rating programs has gained in popularity and the increasing frequency of this promotion is pushing brands to find more inventive ways to cut through consumer consciousness and connect emotionally. There are no clear guidelines to branded entertainment per se in the Australian market, however commercial interests must be declared if the activity doesn't sit in commercial airtime or space. As long as an integration or sponsorship is clearly promotional in nature, rather than paid for, undeclared ‘cash-for-comment’, it is acceptable.

Results

How do you make a successful global campaign relevant to a local market? Snickers is the biggest selling chocolate bar in the world, and the “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign has been brilliantly executed to support this. In Australia however, the Snickers Bar means something slightly different from the rest of the world. It is the unpretentious, down to earth, working class chocolate bar and as such, the U.S. centric, celebrity heavy campaign created a disconnect. “You’re not you when you’re hungry” distills the inability of people to function properly when they haven’t eaten. Our challenge was to give the local market ownership of this campaign whist still leveraging its huge success. Just like the Snickers bar, Australian’s take pride in being down to earth and love poking fun at themselves, so we decided to show real people, making real mistakes, in real time. ‘Snickers Hunger Blunders’ was a series of segments within existing programs, designed to reflect the content of the program itself. The first show was The Project; a lighthearted look at the day’s news. We created a weekly Hunger Blunder segment that ran for 21 weeks. Each segment contained an opening Snickers branded screen, followed by a clip from the global daily news where someone of note had done something funny, silly or outrageous, and finished with the host reminding the audience “you’re not you when you’re hungry”. We also partnered with Before The Game; Australia’s informative, entertaining take on Australian Rules football. 8 times across 24 weeks a Hunger Blunder was shown which contained footage of a player doing something stupid, followed by a hastily convened “press conference” where the player apologized for their behavior and explained it was because they were hungry but they had since eaten a Snickers and were now OK.

The Snickers Hunger Blunders segments were shown as part of existing Australian television shows. The segments were not promoted outside of the programs themselves, therefore the network would promote the show as a whole, there was no specific promotion for Snickers or the Hunger Blunders segment. And that is precisely why the promotion worked so well and the audience were drawn to the content. The nature of the material being embedded in the show, and in-sync with the tone and themes of the show, gave them an authenticity that allowed us to deliver not only branded content but branded entertainment.

The Snickers Hunger Blunders have been a resounding success! 21 content pieces ran in program nationally within The Project and 8 pieces nationally within Before The Game, reaching a combined audience of over 4.2 million and a combined cumulative audience of over 13.5 million. We received in excess of 20 minutes of prime time TV content in program. In addition to our overwhelming success with content, we knew we resonated locally when we saw a 29% increase in agreement with the statement “Snickers is a brand for down to earth people” (from 21% pre campaign to 27% post campaign). And most importantly - sales of Snickers bars increased by over 18% from pre to post campaign!