Results and Effectiveness

Business goals: o Increased annual sales +10% o Increased usage rate amongst 16-19: 142%, 20-24:148% (campaign Pre/post survey) Communication goals: o Increased likability for Snickers: 120% (campaign pre/post survey) 50 media outlets covered the event, including: o TV show, has best rating in Sunday morning: Sunday Japon o Biggest sales tabloid News paper: Tokyo sports o Internet news media: Yahoo! News(has biggest viewer), Naver Matome(Biggest news blog) , Owarai Natalie(Biggest news blog amongst teen), and 35 other news websites covered the event Collectively we achieved over US$1million in PR media exposure, and through SNS reached an additional 2,720,000 followers.

Creative Execution

We gave regular people the chance to apologize for bad behaviour in a fun, dramatic way – at The Snickers Apology Press Conference. Besides telling their stories publically, people got absolution for their bad deeds by being able to blame their actions on ‘hunger’. We had a celebrity ‘face’ to the event – a notorious rebel named Yuya known for his lengthy and dramatic public apologies. We solicited entries online, and then a short list of apologizers was invited to the live event. Invitations went out to the mass and youth-skewed press (both online and offline), and thousands turned out to watch the event live in person and online. At the end, the best apologizer was crowned by Yuya, and he gave everyone the advice that next time, they should all just go out and eat Snickers. Additional communication material was then created from the live content for follow-up campaigns.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Research told us that the children of the Japanese ‘lost decade’ (now actually two decades) have become increasingly distrustful of the large conservative institutions that dominate Japanese life. As corporations have stumbled and governments have fallen, the image of the ‘salaryman’ apologizing at a press conference has become a kind of generational touchstone. ‘Apology Press Conferences’ have become so common that the phrase is now part of the local media vernacular, and the younger generation often reacts to these spectacles with humour - creating memes and online content that celebrates and mocks each failure. So we felt a young irreverent Snickers brand should have some fun in this territory too. We created an irreverent and humourous event that appealed to our younger audience, and then used PR to spread word of the event. Consumer content created from the event was also used in subsequent campaigns to increase local relevance.