When you're hungry you get confused, and if you're shopping online, that tends to mean you buy stupid stuff. We asked if there was a way to tap into poor online choices via China's growing crowdfunding platforms.

We posted crowdfunding projects on JD Finance (China’s Kickstarter) of absolutely terrible ideas, but which might look like good ideas at first glance. These were based on social hot tech topics: environmental friendliness and materials science.

The project demo videos were designed to be shared widely beyond the JD Finance platform in order to drive traffic to the crowdfunding project page, which revealed the campaign punchline: If you think this is a good idea, you must be hungry. For those who unknowingly (or knowingly) decided to fund the idea, their pledges would translate directly into bars of Snickers that would be sent to them to remedy their hunger.

The projects were an environmentally friendly Eco-Fan - a fan that derives all its power directly from the power of the wind; and the Aspire Ventilated Rain Ponch - rainwear that is completely covered in breathing holes. Each project was created on JD Finance in full earnest, complete with project demo videos where the inventors demonstrated why their project was such a good idea.

When consumers pledged for the projects (either knowingly or unknowingly), we knew they must have been hungry. So the amount pledged translated into Snickers bars, which we sent to them. In fact, we turned crowdfunding into a new e-commerce channel for Snickers!

The Hungry Crowdfunding projects lead to 30,000 bars of Snickers being pledged for within the first 3 days, with online impressions numbering more than 250,000 over the same period. Truly there are many hungry-crowdfunders out there!