Stop The Hunger
Read the story- Year
- 2017
- Objective
- Engagement
- Mechanic
- Mini-Games
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- BBDO
Objective
Snickers needed to keep its long-running "You're Not You When You're Hungry" platform fresh for the Middle East and solve pre-roll's biggest problem: viewers skip the ad the instant they can. The brief was to make a Snickers pre-roll people didn't want to skip, pulling them into the story instead of waiting it out.
Solution
The ad auto-plays before the YouTube video the viewer chose, and there's no separate app or link to tap — the game runs inside the ad player itself, using the one control a pre-roll gives you: the pause button. As the story unfolds (one version has a wrestler, the other a rock star turning monstrous with hunger), Snickers bars fly across the screen at intervals, and the viewer has to hit pause at just the right moment to catch each one. An on-screen score, an anger meter, and a countdown track progress as the round plays out. Catch enough bars before time runs out and the character calms down and turns back to normal, closing out the spot; miss too many and he stays hangry through the end.
Results
The two films averaged a 92% view rate, 78% above the industry average.
- 1
The player opens a video on YouTube and a Snickers pre-roll ad autoplays as usual; the ad then reveals itself to be a game, playable with the only control available inside the video player — the pause button.
- 2
Two separate video-games run the same way: one stars a school-bus driver whose hunger turns him into a road-raging wrestler, the other a tennis umpire whose hunger turns him into a tantrum-throwing rock star.
- 3
A game interface — score, an anger meter for the character, and a countdown timer — is overlaid across the full video frame.
- 4
A Snickers bar periodically flies across the bottom of the screen, and the player catches it by pressing pause at the precise instant it lines up, timing the video's freeze-frame like a reflex hit.
- 5
The player has 45 seconds to catch 15 bars, tracked by the on-screen counter; each catch feeds the bar to the character, lowering the anger meter and returning him to normal.
- 6
The game is reached either as an autoplaying pre-roll before a chosen video or via links Snickers posted on social media, where the same clip opens as a normal video playable with the same pause-timing mechanic.
