In 2010, Snickers launched a new advertising campaign that was wildly successful and is still used today titled: “you’re not you when you’re hungry”. The campaign is based around the idea of people turning into a worse version of themselves and acting irrationally when they are hungry. By using a powerful and primitive concept like hunger, Snickers was able to obtain a strong positioning in people’s minds in a moment when hunger completely takes over. The commercials that went along with the campaign were also funny and memorable, with one of their most popular ads from the campaign featuring actress and comedian Betty White as a football player which aired during the 2010 Superbowl. Snickers also had a creative online marketing strategy for the campaign using Google Adwords, and in only two days it gained over 550,000 ad impressions. Snickers’ online strategy was to figure out what the top 500 misspelled word searches in Google were, target these misspelled keywords, and use Adwords to display their ad at the top of the search results to play on the fact that the person misspelled what they were looking for. Below is an example of what would appear if someone googled the word “business” wrong while this online ad campaign was running.
Adwords is Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform, which means that Snickers only had to pay for their “misspelled ads” when someone clicked on their paid search result, which lead the consumer to their website yourenotyouwhenyourehungry.com. Snickers’ original reason for launching this ad campaign was just for ad impressions and having the brand stand out in a unique way. However, their click-through rate was impressive at above one percent, and brought in over 5,500 users to the website. These results were significantly better than what was expected, but Snickers has to cross a major barrier to get there.
When Snickers was still in the developing stages of this online ad campaign, they realized the whole concept around this campaign goes against what Google Adwords believes in. Snickers tried to play on this idea of people acting irrationally and spelling things incorrectly, but Adwords takes into account misspelled words in advertisements and it was actually against their terms to deliberately misspell words in an Adwords ad. This is because Google tries to show its users professional and reliable advertisements in order to contribute positively to the Google user’s experience. As a result, the ad agency working with Snickers on this campaign had to approach Google themselves and work with them to get this Adwords campaign approved. Although it took Snickers a bit of work to get there, this eye-catching and successful Adwords campaign is a great example of how creativity in online advertising can benefit a business.
