M&M's Join The Hunt
- Brand
- M&M's
- Year
- 2009
- Objective
- Sales
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Proximity Canada
- With
- Firstborn
Objective
M&M's needed to move its seasonal Speck-tacular Eggs during Easter, the most cluttered stretch of the candy calendar, against Hershey's and every other egg-shaped competitor. The brand wanted each purchase to double as an entry point into the promotion, and needed the payoff to last across the full three-month run-up to the holiday rather than a single spike, with national TV driving people to the digital hub.
Solution
Players drop into a panning 3D world — a park, a backyard pool, a candy shop, a playground — and hunt each scene for hidden M&M's eggs, with rarer colors worth more points. A PIN code printed inside specially marked egg packs unlocks more eggs on entry, and following clues woven into the scenery — an address painted on a boat under a bridge, another on a candy-shop window — leads to bonus decoy sites with codes of their own. Along the way there's a game of hopscotch, a memory match on a chalkboard, and a daily word-search styled like a newspaper, plus a leaderboard and a 'tell a friend' challenge. Points collect in an on-screen egg basket and convert into instant prizes or sweepstakes entries for trips to New York, Las Vegas, and Orlando, with the whole site playable in English or French.
Results
The campaign drew more than 3,000 unique visitors a day, with users averaging 7 minutes per visit, and generated over 150,000 submitted PIN codes — each one tied directly to a product purchase.
- 1
The entry point is a banner ad that acts out finding a hidden speckled M&M's egg on screen, congratulates the viewer with a point value, and links through to the jointhehunt.ca microsite.
- 2
The site opens on a panoramic park scene with a top menu (How To Hunt, Prizes, Leaderboard, Tell A Friend) and a bottom bar that stays on screen throughout: a login/register link, a PIN-code entry field, and an egg basket icon. A welcome postcard overlay appears first and can be dismissed.
- 3
A tabbed rules overlay, reached from How To Hunt, explains the hunt across four topics and lists a colour-to-point-value table for the eggs (pink worth the most, down to white).
- 4
Players register an account to bank codes, then collect PIN codes two ways: offline, by buying specially marked egg packages (which also carry a chance at an instant prize), or online, by finding codes and typing them into the persistent PIN field.
- 5
The egg basket screen tallies collected codes by colour and totals the points earned, showing which colours are still missing.
- 6
The core online loop has players pan through a set of panoramic scenes (park, backyard and pool, candy shop, playground, under a bridge) hunting for speckled eggs camouflaged in the scenery. Some scenes also hide clues in the decor, such as an address on a shop window, one carved into a tree, and one painted on a boat, that send the player off-site to decoy hunt websites.
- 7
The playground scene branches into separate minigames: a hopscotch-style number grid, a memory-matching game with grids of coloured candies, and a daily word search set inside an in-game newspaper.
- 8
Points collected raise both the odds of instant-win prizes and entries into a sweepstakes for three family vacations for four; separate menu screens track the prize pool, a leaderboard ranking, and a referral tool for inviting friends.
- 9
A persistent footer on every screen holds the utility layer: rules and regulations, privacy policy, legal, contact, a French-language toggle, and a sound on/off switch.
