Watch above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
Okay, Steve. You know what? I’m not saying anything. Here, watch this.

 

Mike, come on!

Mike, what is your deal, man?

Oh, come on, man! You’ve been riding me all day!

Mike, you’re playing like Betty White out there.

That’s not what your girlfriend says.

Jamie.

Oh, whoa, whoa.

That’s not cool, man.

Eat a Snickers. Better?

Better.

Hike!

I’m open.

That hurt.

You’re not you when you’re hungry. Snickers-

Matthew Burns:
Thank, God. And that’s the guy from Barney Miller, right? The final tackle on the QB. Oh, my God. There’s a campaign like no other. They’re in every country. They’ve done this campaign in every country. They’ve done crazy, different versions of these ads. They’ve done a really good job of really trying to hit the sensibilities of the country, obviously using their celebrities. This whole idea for me, this one’s all about random entry, heavily leaning on entertainment and shared experience.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, and an element of truth. Before Snickers came along, there was an expression of hangry that existed and they just decided to own it.

Matthew Burns:
Right. Oh dude, I have to tell you this story. I had two young kids. I have two boys, and we were driving in the car, and we’d been out doing things all day. So maybe it was 2:00 in the afternoon. I asked a question, I leaned over and said to my wife, Sandra, I can’t remember the question, I’ll be honest, but I asked her a question. And she went, “Just get me home.” That was literally it. I went, “Okay, I got it.”

I drove to a Wendy’s and picked her up a thing of fries just so she would have something in her belly, because she was hangry. I was like, “Don’t you talk to me like that.” No. Okay, but I just took care of her. These commercials hit me hard, and I think they’re brilliantly done, incredibly entertaining. I mean, Roseanne Barr’s been a character in them. There’s a few other ones.

Stephen Semple:
Oh, they’ve had Liza Minnelli they’ve had Aretha Franklin. My favorite, which I know you’re not sharing, my favorite is the Joe Pesci one, where he’s at a party and he’s giving everybody crap and somebody gives him, and then all of a sudden he calms down. I think you should show the Robin Williams one.

Matthew Burns:
Okay.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Matthew Burns:
Okay. Here, watch this one.

 

Fourth down, coach, what do we do?

I’ll tell you what we do. I want you to go on the field, look for anything with an O. Lets kill them with kindness. Jimmy, want you to make balloon animals. Tyler, make little tea cozy, something fun.

Are you okay?

We’ll win this for mother Russia.

Coach need a Snickers.

Why is that, chief.

You get a little loopy when you’re hungry. Better.

Better.

Now, let’s go forth.

Go get them, guys.

You’re not you when you’re hungry. Snickers satisfies.

Matthew Burns:
See, every time, every time.

Stephen Semple:
See, I think what’s great is they’ve created two different scenarios. They’ve created a scenario where you’re doing something athletic. They’ve created the scenario where you’re just going loopy. The thing that’s cool is they decided in this campaign, go to YouTube and watch them.

Matthew Burns:
Oh yeah.

Stephen Semple:
They’ve decided this campaign to lean into all the different emotion, and it gets even better. They extended this campaign at one point. They even changed the wrappers. There was a little period of time where it didn’t say Snickers, it said, Hangry. It said all the different, all these different expressions.

Matthew Burns:
That’s right, they did channel alignment.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, it was just a fabulous campaign.

Matthew Burns:
And it ran for a good while. Because when I was looking through to try and get good examples, and I tried to get visually appealing ones so that it was easy to pop in here, but they’ve been running it for a while. The characters that they, they’ve tried not to duplicate. They did a really good job of not duplicating a scenario in any way, shape, or form. They lean into the sports ones, which I think are funny.

They’ve got one, it’s a bunch of soccer players playing high-level soccer, and they’re divas. Now, let’s just call it spade a spade, soccer players are divas, the high performing soccer players are divas, so I don’t know if the Snickers is going to help, but it was great that they leaned into that very heavily.

Random entry, every single one starts in a very weird spot, okay?

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Matthew Burns:
We talk about this a lot on the Empire Builders Podcast, you’ve talked about random entry a lot of times and how it works and why it works. The best thing is that everything is connected. We talk about this at the Wizard Academy, so that random entry of start somewhere in the middle, and then get to your point, and you’ll find a way to do that. So if you’re writing ads or you’re thinking about what you want to do for your brand, think about that one weird, strange scenario, boom, you can get to that point.

The other thing that I wrote down here was highly entertaining. These ones are leaning heavily into the entertainment value. They’re not telling you anything. They don’t talk to you about the nuts, the chocolate, the caramel. They’re not talking about anything. It’s all about entertainment. They’re owning your brain for 30 seconds or a minute at a time. You can’t think of anything else. If you think about being hungry, you’re not buying an O’Henry.

Stephen Semple:
And the interesting part is, it’s an ad about transformation. It’s a chocolate bar that’s going to take you from this state to this state, going to take you from being loopy to not loopy, to take you from not performing well to performing well. But, the other part that’s interesting, and we see this so much with great ads, is the product is not shown in the first three seconds. That’s what everybody wants to do – show the product in the first three seconds. It’s like, no, the product does not appear until the very end.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. There’s the delivery, which is probably three-quarters the way through the ad. It’s the delivery, and then it’s product shot at the end.

Stephen Semple:
And it’s not, “Here, have a Snickers bar,” it’s-

Matthew Burns:
Like, “Here, have this.”

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. 100 hundred percent.

Stephen Semple
Now you know it is, because you see it unwrapped and whatnot, but it’s subtle, right? Like it-

Matthew Burns:
And you only need to see one of these to know exactly what the commercial is about.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, it’s brilliant.

Matthew Burns:
No, I think they did a really good job. Again, it’s that… We talked about it with De Beers. De Beers would run a campaign in the US and then they would take that campaign, they would run it in other countries, and it worked just as well. Humans are humans. Really lean into that, understand that. Everybody’s the same. Yes, culturally, we have little micro differences, but for the most part, our emotions are the same.

Stephen Semple:
I think about the only thing that, if I was running that campaign and I was creating ones for different markets would be you could pick celebrities. For example, if you’re running it India, you could pick a celebrity in India that’s not necessarily known in the United States and do the same. Now, there’s the iconic ones that are known worldwide, but then, there’s also the ones that are known more in their local markets.

Matthew Burns:
Mars Singapore, if you go to YouTube and you go, and I’ll put a link in the description, Mars Singapore, if you look at theirs, it’s very Singapore.

Stephen Semple:
There you go.

Matthew Burns:
We don’t recognize them, but the emotion in the stories are actually all very, very relatable.

Stephen Semple:
Sure. They’re just changing… You could take the Betty White one, and if you had an iconic Singapore, elderly actress who had the same gravitas as Betty White, you could’ve dropped them into that ad and would work. You might not do football, but you can drop it into the ad and do something very similar.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. Yeah, 100 hundred percent. This is a campaign that got better with age, and then it just ran its course. It really did. It ran its course. Everybody understood it, they leaned into it so heavy, they just, so many different versions of it, they weren’t coming up with, I think they just got to a point where they couldn’t come up with more ideas for it.

Stephen Semple:
So we should end with you showing your favorite one and how that is being-

Matthew Burns:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
This is Matthew’s fave.

Matthew Burns:
And it’s not an American one, this one played in the UK.

 

[foreign language 00:08:36] Snickers.

You’re not you when you’re hungry. Snickers, get some nuts.

Stephen Semple:
I think we should just end it on that.

Matthew Burns:
Done. Thanks.

Stephen Semple:
See you. Bye.

Matthew Burns:
Bye.

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