Advertising to teenagers can be tricky. They spend most of their time online and they hate being forced to watch ads. So, instead of forcing them to watch an ad about milk we decided to create something they’d want to watch. Snack Time is an animated web series with no traditional branding or call to action. However, every episode centers around milk and the snacks that go best with it. The perfect thing for teens to enjoy in their downtime when they’re relaxing, and probably thinking about having a snack.

Every two weeks, we introduce a new episode on YouTube, along with Tumblr content which supports our videos with animated GIFs and static cartoons. They feature our hero milk character “Carlton” and his snack friends “Chip”, Muffin, Marshmallow, Cracker, and more.

The series was unbranded by design to engage with teens on their terms, so media placement complemented rather than interrupted their content of choice. We utilized promoted YouTube video, YouTube Reserve skippable pre-roll, user initiated placements and text links. We also ran special episodes at the cinema during the 3 biggest teen films of the year: Avengers, Jurassic World and Star Wars. For Avengers and Jurassic World, we created 20,000 Carlton-shaped USBs, rewarding teen cinema-goers with additional content and promoting the YouTube channel. To amplify the cinema campaign, we partnered with Buzzfeed for a series of custom stories that linked Avengers and Jurassic World with our cinema-themed content.

We utilized quarterly tracking that measured brand health metrics and relied on youth providing self-reported current milk consumption and future intent. Our audience report they consume 13 servings of milk per week – versus 10.6 servings per week for teens not watching our content. Milk has gained 6.5% across brand health metrics (emotions, occasions, positioning, personality). The percentage of teens in Western Canada who agree “milk is a fun drink” increased 9%. Finally, 28.2% of our Snack Time audience say they will drink more milk in the future compared to those that have not seen Snack Time at only 18.3% - a substantial 10% difference.

By end-March 2016, we released 53 videos, 35 Tumblr posts, built an online community that includes over 25,000 YouTube subscribers and 8,000 Tumblr followers. We’ve amassed over 10.5 million episode views and over 7.4 million Tumblr impressions.