2019 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for Integrated?

With KSA and Egypt qualified for the World Cup we have seen an opportunity to be relevant for one of the biggest target audience ever: football fans. But we had to do it in a different way. We couldn’t be only on TV, we had to be with the people: that’s why we went in the places where supporter watch football, bringing to them the Hunger-Proof Football Experience, an experience designed to avoid potential hunger related disasters.

Background

KSA and Egypt qualified to the World Cup for the first time after many, many years. We are talking about 130 million, very passionate people. They love football as much as European and South Americans do, and while usually they pick a random national team to support, now they will have the opportunity to see their national colors represented in the most important football event of the world. Which means that this time, their hearts are on the line. We were asked to develop a long term, scalable campaign (March till end of July) creating one consistent idea all the way, and at the same time to be relevant for a target audience we have never spoke with before, to increase not only the brand love, but also be the top of mind snack while watching a football game, and ultimately to create a long-lasting association between Snickers and football.

Describe the creative idea.

We know that hunger makes you crazy, dramatic, emotional. And so does football. And when hunger meets football fever, results are catastrophic. Because a hungry fan, is an angry fan. For this World Cup, we wanted to make sure that everyone (130mln potential fans only in KSA and Egypt) would have the right football experience, in a way only Snickers could. With the Hunger-Proof Football Experience we wanted to design a series of gadgets that could resist the hungriest fan of all: we created an unbreakable TV, an unsmashable remote controller, unspillable cups, knowing that these are the preferred victims of angry supporters. We even designed a pair of undestroyable shin guards for those who likes to kick things around when they get angry. We launched the experience on small scale, and we are to launch it in the whole middle east for the World Cup.

Describe the strategy

Interest for football in Middle East has grown to the point that the region has started affecting positively the revenues of the English Premier League (The Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance 2016). Interest in football is gigantic, and involves primarily the same target audience that Snickers talks to: young men between 18 and 35. With an unprecedented hype for the World Cup in the region, we have worked our way to the heart of the consumers. Since Snickers is just a chocolate bar, we couldn’t associate ourselves directly to the game of football, like most of the brands do, so we associated ourselves with football fans. More specifically we wanted to be associated with the moment where a fan is emotionally more vulnerable, in order to fulfil our brand purpose and be relevant to our target audience, staying true to the “you’re not you when you’re hungry” platform.

Describe the execution.

It was crucial to engage with our target in an organic and disruptive way. More than anyone else, football fans are bothered with advertising. They genuinely despise the “commercial break”, because it spoils the moment they are living. Instead, we wanted to be their buddies, so we decided to be there in silence, but next to them, like a real friend would do during such solemn moment. The campaign started on TV and social media, and then moved on ground, bringing the Hunger-Proof Football Experience directly to the people. In the first three weeks of the campaign we had hunger-proofed the major sport bars in the region, between Riyadh, Jeddah, Cairo, Alessandria and Dubai, and now planning to hunger-proof even more bars with the beginning of the World Cup. Ultimately, we’ll run a promo in the next weeks to give the people a chance to win all our gadgets.

List the results.

During the first month of the campaign the sales increased by 13%, thanks to a strong media placement during the final sessions of the Champions League. The campaign received a +94% positive sentiment, with 2 million social impressions. Only on YouTube the campaign gained more than 5 million views. The brand, without having communicated about football before, is now getting into supporters’ rituals, as part of the football game nights.