Snickers had a leaky bucket problem with the must-win under-35-year-old audience. Research showed they liked our product and campaign as much as any competitor but just weren’t thinking about us near purchase. We needed to find a way to make our proposition of hunger satisfaction more meaningful to the things they care about, in order to drive the salience and relevance needed to reverse penetration declines.

We knew gaming was a huge part of life for the under-35 audience that Snickers had been struggling to recruit. Through a series of in-depth interviews, twitch meet-ups, and gamer surveys we discovered a recurring theme that had a strong link to Snickers and hunger mistakes: Gaming Fails. So we created a Hunger Insurance just for gamers. Gamers who had a “hunger accident” could come to our site, file a claim and get a discounted Snickers based on the type of mistake they made and how hungry they were. We developed video assets with game-like graphics and characters to amplify our offering to gamers across a programmatic network and social channels like TikTok, where gaming communities thrive. And we developed GIF-like social posts and banners to drive traffic to our hunger insurance website where visitors could see what types of gaming fails were covered and file their claims.

We knew gaming was a huge part of life for the under-35 audience that Snickers had been struggling to recruit. We also knew that gamers were willing to spend money to buy in-game features that gave them a better chance of winning - console gamers spend an average of $84 a year on in-game content. This was a valuable share of wallet that Snickers wanted to tap into. In parallel, we identified Gaming Fails (embarrassingly boneheaded gaming mistakes) as a rich territory to infuse this in-game commerce because we knew that gamers would be willing to pay to avoid them. With our additional insight that there was no insurance for gamers we developed our hunger insurance idea, making Snickers commerce central to winning while bringing more meaning to “hunger satisfaction.”

We launched a Snickers Hunger Insurance designed explicitly for gamers. We created a fully functional Hunger Insurance website where gamers could peruse a rich variety of policies specifically tailored to gaming and file a claim in real time with an insurance agent via a chatbot. The chatbot instantly assessed claims and immediately delivered a coupon for a free or discounted Snickers based on the type of claim and how hungry the gamer was when the accident occurred. To drive gamers to the site we created OLVs that highlighted common hunger mistakes and even created a catchy insurance jingle to give our offering extra credibility. And we did all of these things in a variety of languages to reach a global audience.

Our campaign exceeded conversion and reach benchmarks across virtually every metric tracked.

From a conversion standpoint, we drove 367K clicks to our hunger insurance website which was more than 5x expected based on past click rates. Our click through rate, 0.49%, was 475% higher than projected and 23% above industry benchmarks. From these site visits, we generated 387 coupons for in-store redemption. In all, the high rate of engagement delivered a cost-per-click rate 85% cheaper than planned. From a reach perspective, our videos were viewed 38 million times in just 4 weeks; 22% above our planned views. And we delivered 75 million impressions; 18% above our planned reach totals.