Watch above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
So I have a question for you, Steve. When you eat your Smarties, what color do you eat last?

Stephen Semple:
Well, they tell you you’re supposed to eat the red ones last.

Matthew Burns:
But which color do you eat last?

Stephen Semple:
I’m going to tell you, and I like Smarties. I’m going to tell you it’s whatever they order that comes out of the box.

Matthew Burns:
So they didn’t brainwash you. Okay. So guys, we’re going to talk about Smarties. Smarties is a Nestle brand, and not only just a Nestle brand, but it’s a billion-dollar-per-year Nestle brand. So in 2025, they were still part of the billionaire brand club at Nestle, which means that they made $1.1 billion or more in the fiscal year of 2025.

Stephen Semple:
Wow. So they’re still doing that well. Wow.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. And they’ve been around, and I got a note here. They’ve been around for a long time. 1967 was the first time that the campaign ran the way it is. It was invented about 10 years prior to that. And it was invented in the UK. I mean, Nestle is a Swiss brand.

Stephen Semple:
Like the product…

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, the product itself was invented in the UK. And it’s now in 185 countries around the world, not in the United States. You cannot get Smarties in the United States, which is amazing to me, considering the market.

Stephen Semple:
It is amazing to me.

Matthew Burns:
But I can tell you why. The reason for this is that there’s a brand of candy, and we’ve all eaten it. You can get these in Canada. I don’t know how you can get these in Canada, but you can’t get Smarties chocolate in the States. It’s these little tubes of hard-pressed dextrose candy that you usually get at Halloween, and you pull them like this, and they’re the little tablets, and then they melt into a powder in your mouth, and they’re called Smarties. And so that’s made in the United States. So somehow they block, trademark-wise, they block-

Stephen Semple:
Oh, so they probably preexisted, owned the name.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
So if Smarties went into the United States. They would have to be called something other than Smarties.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
Basically, Nestle said, “Meh.”

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. And it’s weird because we can get Smarties candy in Canada and the Smarties chocolate in Canada, but it’s not the other way around. In the United States, you would probably run for a bag of M&Ms. It’d be the same idea, candy-coated chocolate. But I’m going to play the ad. And the reason why I got really excited to do this one is that Smarties really lean heavily into… Remember, we’ve talked about it with the 1950s ads for the cigarettes, and I’m drawing a blank on it. I did it with Dave Young. We talked about echoic memory with McDonald’s. These guys killed it with this campaign. And it was done by Ogilvy and Mather, who created the campaign in Toronto. Proudly Canadian. So we’re boasting a little bit.

Stephen Semple:
I had no idea this campaign was created in Toronto.

Matthew Burns:
See?

Stephen Semple:
Okay, cool.

Matthew Burns:
Cool. So, all right. So watch this ad.

 

Man Singing:
When you eat your Smarties,
Do you eat the red ones last?
Do you suck them very slowly,
Or crunch them very fast?
Eat that candy-coated chocolate,
But tell me when I ask,
When you eat your Smarties,
Do you eat the red ones last?

Man and Children Singing:
When you eat your Smarties,
Do you eat the red ones last?
Do you suck them very slowly,
Or crunch them very fast?
Eat that candy-coated chocolate,
But tell me when I ask,
When you eat your Smarties,
Do you eat the red ones last?

Matthew Burns:
And I think this ad worked because of the over-the-top delivery from the original singer.

Stephen Semple:
Oh, no question. Tell me when I ask. And that and the visual images of the…

Stephen Semple:
Oh, totally. That’s why this works.

Matthew Burns:
That’s right. I love the old Smarties box, like the old logo. I would say it’s a very boring old logo. The new one I like much better. When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last? Do you suck them very slowly? Do you crunch it very fast? Eat that candy-coated chocolate, but tell me when I ask. When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last?

Stephen Semple:
Right. Which is basically 15 seconds that they just looped twice.

Matthew Burns:
And they literally looped twice. They sped it up on the second pass. They had kids join in. So you get the kids singing it at home, and that’s what they’re going to hear in the car and blah, blah, blah. It’s brilliantly done. Composed specifically for them, they own everything about the song. And they repeated this for years. This is a 30-year-old campaign, and the last time they revived it was in 2015. So again, that’s 11 years, or almost 11 full years, since the last time it was on TV.

And when they did it in 2015, they screwed it up. So we’ve talked about this in the past, where they do really well, and then they screw it up. Because in 2015, people are getting fat in North America and around the world. They didn’t say the red ones last. They said, “Do you save the red ones?” Because they wanted specifically to try to drive portion control.

Stephen Semple:
So here’s what I always love about things like that. You want the ad to talk about portion control, and then you supersize everything.

Matthew Burns:
Right.

Stephen Semple:
You make your boxes 10 times bigger, you supersize everything. It’s like, you know what? And this is the reason why things like that don’t work. It’s not authentic. Everyone knows you don’t give a crap about portion control because if you did, the box would not be three times bigger than the size of the boxes that we got when we were kids.

Matthew Burns:
Correct.

Stephen Semple:
The standard size box is twice the size of the box that we got when we were kids. So when they do that, everybody knows it’s not authentic. And on top of that, the line that kids remember is, do you eat the red ones last? No one’s going to remember. “Oh, Matthew, do you save?”

Matthew Burns:
This is what was incredible about the way they set this up. We talk about this when we… So if you have a chance and you’re a marketer or a business owner, you want to take some really good marketing courses, go to the Wizard Academy down in Austin, Texas. And we learned something there called the first mental image, the last mental image. This 15-second jingle literally starts off, do you eat the red ones last? And it says, at the very end, do you eat the red ones last? First mental image, last mental image. They doubled down, tripled down on this whole idea of do you eat the red ones last? And then you try to revive the whole thing and say, “Do you save the red ones?”

Stephen Semple:
Right. Now, if you wanted to do, do you save the red ones, you’d actually need to change the whole feel of it. So the feeling that you would have to change it to is that this is something so good that you want to savor it.

Matthew Burns:
The thing you protect at all costs. Yes.

Stephen Semple:
Right. Which means you’d have to slow the music, you’d have to slow the pace, you’d have to slow the whole thing. This whole, “Oh, let’s just throw this throwaway line in.” Again, it’s this whole thing of what’s the emotion you’re trying to evoke… Yeah, it’s a complete fail.

Matthew Burns:
Now, don’t get me wrong, it has not killed their sales. Again, they’re a billion-dollar brand. That one specific candy that is about this big, that big in a box, they make a billion dollars a year on. So I don’t feel bad for them, but man, and maybe it’s a nostalgia thing, and I get really… I would build that up in my brain, don’t change it.

McDonald’s did that when they changed their slogan for their two all-beef patties. They killed it in 1985 when they tried to change it. The offer, whatever the offer was, was to get a free hamburger, and then it was to get a free upsize on your Coke or whatever it was in Australia. Just changing it so that it kills the actual message it was built for. But for echoic retention, for memorization, for easily having instant recall, right? You do not have to hear them sing the words.

As soon as you hear that, you know what song it is. It’s immediate. And so I wanted to show it off. Again, this is one of those brands that’s from my childhood. I’ve eaten a Smartie or two, and I would always eat the blue ones last. It’s my favorite color. So I ate the blue ones last. But the song doesn’t change. The feeling doesn’t change. It actually allowed me to be important because it asked me, do I eat the red ones last? No, I ate the blue ones last. I get to inject myself into it. It didn’t tell me what to do. It allowed me to feel a way about it. Right.

Stephen Semple:
Which allowed you to participate in it.

Matthew Burns:
Correct. Ask me a direct question. As a kid, if you’re watching that, as a kid, you’re being asked a direct question from a commercial, like, “Hey, what do you think? ” You’re like, “Man, I’m in. Let’s go. I’m in this whole thing.” So I really like this. The campaign ran forever. The UK, Canada, and Australia are the top three countries where this has been sold, but it’s in 185 countries worldwide.

Stephen Semple:
Wow. Amazing.

Matthew Burns:
So congratulations, Nestle, you did a good job.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, absolutely.

Matthew Burns:
We’ll talk, guys, next time on another Sticky Sales Stories.

Latest posts by Sticky Sales Stories (see all)