Snickers needed to find a way to join the World Cup party with very limited budgets and restrictive FIFA guidelines—which included not mentioning ‘World Cup’ in any branded material.

Snickers needed agile digital posts to join in on the online hype surrounding the World Cup. The problem was the brand wasn't allowed to mention 'World Cup' without an official sponsorship. At the same time, Snickers picked up on users committing a lot of typographical errors in their official hashtags, from #WorldCapFinals, to #WorldCopFinals. The brand took advantage of this, using every hashtag that sounded like 'World Cup', and cleverly created the 'Wrong World Finals'. Communicating one simple message: You watch the wrong match when you're hungry.

Snickers needed to hijack the topic without putting the words ‘World Cup’ into the final branded materials. Through social listening, the brand picked up on typographical errors in the use of World Cup’s official hashtag and decided to take advantage. By creating the ‘Wrong World Finals’, Snickers cleverly turned online mess-ups into an opportunity to communicate with football fans all trying to catch the different World Cup matches.

In Malaysia and Thailand, consumers often have more than one mobile phone, with social media being the top activity at 71%. Keeping this in mind, Snickers designed a social-based activity to engage with football fans in creating their own World Cup content. To get noticed on a very limited media budget, timing was important too. Snickers released social materials on the week of the World Cup finals, when the topic was at its peak.

The brand created a series of promotional posts for the Wrong World Finals jumping off from the wrong hashtags found online. These were released during finals week. Snickers hijacked trending World Cup topics on social media by tagging shared posters with all relevant World Cup hashtags. To keep users engaged, the brand invited them to suggest their own ‘Wrong World Final’ and responded to them over the course of finals week with customized posters and GIFs of their suggestions.

Each poster made used different styles and mediums to visually show our interpretation of each Wrong World Final. Aside from being released online, Snickers also placed posters in underground passes and sports bars to remind people not to watch the wrong match hungry.

Against all odds, Snickers was able to achieve mass awareness in two countries on a shoestring budget. The campaign was quickly picked up by international sports and news sites—including Campaign Asia- Pacific—who gave their own Wrong World Finals suggestions. This attention resulted in a PR reach of 558k fans in just three days. This gave the brand 81% higher organic reach versus the average of all paid posts over the last 5 months and an ROI of nearly 280%.