The Campaign

To modernize “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” and also make price something worth following outside the store, we created the Hungerithm. A hunger-algorithm that that monitored online mood and lowered SNICKERS® prices accordingly at every 7-Eleven in Australia. The angrier the Internet got, the cheaper SNICKERS® became, with prices dropping to as low as 82% off the normal price.   The Hungerithm was built on a 3,000-word lexicon and analyzed over 14,000 social posts a day to determine sentiment. It even understood slang and sarcasm.   Once mood was established, it was assigned to one of ten price points, ranging from $1.75 AUD (roughly $1.30 USD) when people were “PRETTY CHILL” to 50 cents AUD (roughly 30 cents USD) when they were “LOSING IT”.   The Hungerithm ran live 24/7 (updating 144 times a day) at SNICKERS.com.au, where users simply clicked a button to generate a 7-Eleven barcode right on their phones.

Creative Execution

The campaign was rolled out in two phases: awareness and conversion. Awareness involved a PR push to over 50 publishers, which resulted in coverage in over 150 publications, an online video which was pushed out across social platforms and online pre-roll. The conversion phase involved time-targeted messages across mobile banners, digital radio and video. These conversion messages involved talking to people on their commute to work, in-between meals and on their way home – all times when they’re most likely to be angry and need a SNICKERS®®. The campaign ran for 5 weeks, launching on May 24, 2016 and ending on June 27.

One-in-five people redeemed a barcode from the site. The campaign was covered in over 150 articles including features in global publications like Mashable, Inc Magazine and Creativity Online. Press was overwhelmingly positive, with comments like “…an ingenious Australian advertising campaign, when the Internet gets angry the price of SNICKERS® will drop. Feed your rage, people,” from Mashable. The PR coverage equated to $1.4m in earned media value. Plus the campaign had over 30 million media impressions, uniquely reaching 4 million people in Australia alone.

The SNICKERS® Hungerithm campaign leveraged an array of existing media, ranging from social videos to time-targeted Spotify ads to in-store messaging. But it also created new media of sorts, by taking the current in-store price of SNICKERS® and turning it into something worth following. Users could follow it at the Hungerithm website, where they could not only see the price updating every 10 minutes, but also read social posts that showed why the Internet felt a certain way at a given moment.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Despite the fact that the Internet enlightens and entertains us, it can also be an angry place. We noticed that outbursts of anger, tweets of frustration and annoyed selfies tended to peak between meals. This observation made us wonder, is the Internet angry simply because it’s hungry? People learnt about this idea through dedicated online films, page take-overs, time-targeted Spotify ads and a constant feed of reactive Tweets and social updates. It was also complemented by broadcast integration showing the Hungerithm in full flight. And the more people heard about the Hungerithm, the more they got involved.