While producing commercials involving celebrities, it is easy to forget the supporting cast. We created 2 Snickers commercials for 2 different campaigns six months apart. And it had one thing in common. We had inadvertently casted the same actor twice. This was not a big issue until one social influencer with 2 million followers pointed it out. This led to a lot of conversations online. While people wondered who the actor was, the diehard fans of brand ambassador Wang Jun Khai questioned the motive and the move.

Instead of ignoring this, we turned our own tagline ‘You are not you when you are hungry’ against us. We owned up to the mistake and blamed it all on hunger. This time, the Snickers marketing team had made a hungry mistake.

To take on the social influencer who had spotted the mistake and the resulting conversations, we had to respond in almost real time. But a regular response would not do the trick. People often go all out and reveal everything about themselves on social media. What if we did the same? Our approach was to state the truth - that the marketing team was hungry during the casting. And from there make the most of how social media works.

While the topic was gaining traction, we quickly shot and edited a video of the marketing team admitting their hungry mistake and posted it the very next day. We got approvals from their legal department in record time that enabled us to feature the actual Snickers marketing team in the video.

But we did not stop with just the response. We went one step further and casted the random actor again. And again. In fact, we went ahead and made him our social ambassador. In a span of a week, we had turned a mistake in to something more positive and long lasting. Whenever and wherever there was hunger, our new influencer was there doing what he does best – giving out Snickers.

In a market where social influencers rule the roost and advertisers pay millions to engage them, we ended up creating our own social influencer. Our new social influencer was all over our social channels engaging with the audience and offering them a Snickers. The campaign and our new influencer featured in over a hundred media outlets in China. The campaign was also recognized by Mars China as the most engaging campaign in 2019 to date.