Why watch a pre-roll when you can play one?

These pre-rolls spots sought to engage audiences by turning the pre-roll into a game viewers could “play” using the only input available: The Pause button.

At certain intervals throughout the two spots, a Snickers bar crosses the bottom of the screen.

The viewer is challenged to “catch” the Snickers by way of a perfectly timed press of the pause button.

With a little luck and timing, the title characters could be transformed back into their original selves.

Our films were designed to be played as pre-roll ads on YouTube, and automatically played before our target audience’s selected videos. People were also directed to the videos from the Snickers’ social media pages.

Reach:

Over 2 million total views in first week of launch. An unprecedented 92% audience retention rate, 78% higher than the industry standard. That means that the vast majority of viewers chose to watch the spots to the very end.

Source: YouTube, Facebook analytics, February 2017

Snickers’ audience in the region is Youtube crazy, making a pre-roll the perfect channel to reach them. But most viewers skip prerolls. So we made spots that viewers didn’t just watch, but could also play as a game. Working with the limitations of YouTube’s preroll format, the game used the only control input available: the pause button. As no code can be used in preroll video, the whole game mechanic relied solely on an editing trick, where pausing at the right time, allowed viewers to “give” the title character in the spot a Snickers bar.

Snickers target market covers millennials who have grown up in an era of videogames. As such, they instinctively understand gamification and seize upon any opportunity to play.

Using design and sound elements from classic 8-bit gaming, our videos primed our audience into game mode from the get go and convinced them to stick with the video to the end.

With the launch of custom Snickers bars that featured individual traits such as “Anger”, “Rebelliousness” and “Spaced”, Mars wanted to draw attention to their new range with a pre-roll commercial on YouTube.

Challenge

More often than not, pre-roll commercials are skipped as soon as possible so that the viewer can watch their selected video.

Objectives:

Our challenge was to convince the viewer to stick around for the duration of the video.