The Snickers ‘You’re Not You When You’re Hungry’ campaign is a global phenomenon, but often relies on celebrity status to gain attention. Our PR challenge was to create a piece of communication that got talked about, but had no celebrity. So to ignite conversations about Snickers we tapped into a poignant societal tension. We definitely hit a nerve.

Our idea involved staging a stunt to give the campaign platform an unexpected twist. We took over a construction site in Melbourne and flipped the stereotypical behaviour of the builders by getting them to call out statements about empowerment and equality to the unsuspecting public below. We filmed the reactions, uploaded it to YouTube, seeded our video to key social influencers and media outlets and waited. PR was central to our strategy and media coverage was crucial to our success.

It worked. With no paid media support, in just over 60 hours we amassed over 1 million views, got featured on every national breakfast TV show including hundreds of national and international media publishers like Time, Fox News, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Forbes.

We got memed and parodied within 24 hours, shared 680,000 times and sparked worldwide debate about gender equality. Within 2 weeks, 3.5 million people had viewed it in 194 countries.

We generated over $11 million in earned media and a total of 238 million earned media impressions. Result? The most social engaged campaign in Snickers history.

We took over a construction site in the Melbourne business district - a destination of over 100,000 daily commuting workers. The builders on the site were replaced with actors, we made their behaviour unexpected and surprising, by having them shout out empowering statements to unsuspecting members of the public.

To be successful, the content had to resonate with our audience and be easily shareable across multiple platforms to maximise exposure.

The video was uploaded to YouTube, then distributed as content to key blogs, websites and seeded with influential mass media outlets to generate a groundswell to ignite conversation. And it did just that.

We allowed 2 days to pass before engaging paid social placements so that the video could be discovered naturally and passed around by opinion formers. However due to the viral success of the campaign, we cancelled the placements within 48 hours.

Within 24 hours Snickers had been discussed, debated and parodied across the globe. Everyone had an opinion and boy did they want to share it. We gained editorial coverage on major national and international TV networks, online blogs, newspapers and radio.

In 2 weeks it generated over $11 million in earned media, 238 million earned media impressions, 680,000 shares and 3.5 million views. We were the most shared video on YouTube in Australia and made the top five globally. Making it the most socially engaged campaign in Snickers history.

Due to the stunts’ viral success, all paid advertising was pulled and we finished up with an ROI of $441 earned media value for every $1 spent. And best of all Snickers came out on top with positive sentiment of our controversial video of 60%.