Second Screen Staredown
View the case- Brand
- Twix
- Year
- 2025
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Other
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- UNIT9
Objective
Twix wanted a piece of Super Bowl LIX without buying airtime, launching its new US platform line, "Two is more than one." With 79% of viewers already planning to check their phones during the game (and 60% of those scrolling social), Twix built something to fill that exact moment — turning second-screen habit into on-brand entertainment during the ad breaks it couldn't otherwise afford.
Solution
Open twix.com/staredown on your phone and you're face to face with two golden Twix bars that have human eyes and a lot of opinions. The front camera locks onto your gaze, and during each of the game's 31 ad breaks, you're in a staring contest with the bars — don't blink, don't look away. The longer you hold their stare, the more entries you rack up toward a sweepstakes prize. All the while, the bars talk back with one of 200-plus recorded lines, heckling, cheering, or just riffing on how long you've lasted. A warm-up mode went live a week before kickoff so players could calibrate their camera and get a feel for it before game day; the real rounds ran live, synced to the actual broadcast breaks.
Results
761,103 sweepstakes entries, with roughly 760,000 of those coming on game day alone. Average session length was 25 minutes 31 seconds, with one player holding a stare for 1 hour 15 minutes 29 seconds. The activation drew 1.37 billion impressions and 782 media placements, generating an estimated $329 million in earned media value.
- 1
Starting a week before the Super Bowl, the player opens twix.com/staredown on a phone as a practice mode, then returns to the same page during the live broadcast as a second screen alongside the TV.
- 2
The page requests access to the phone's front-facing camera, which is required to play; once granted, two golden Twix bars with human eyes and a cocky attitude appear on screen, staring back at the player.
- 3
The core loop is a staring contest: the game unlocks in sync with the live game's ad breaks, and during each break the player holds their gaze on the bars while the camera tracks their eyes and gives real-time visual feedback on how long they've held it.
- 4
While the player stares, the bars talk back, drawing from a pool of over 200 surreal voice lines that react to the player's focus with encouragement, jokes, and non sequiturs.
- 5
Time spent staring converts into sweepstakes entries, and the player can return for each of the broadcast's ad breaks (31 in total) to rack up more entries across the game.
- 6
Players who don't want to use the camera can instead enter the sweepstakes directly through a form at twix.com/staredown/enter.
- 7
The game closes when the broadcast's final ad break ends, and a winner is later drawn at random from all entries to receive two 1-kilogram gold bars shaped like a Twix.
