Snickers recently launched a very clever guerrilla marketing campaign using out-of-home media. The brand placed stickers that read “You make mistakes when you’re hungry" near silly “fails" found throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn — for example, a railing that goes up when the stairs go down or a door that says both “Enter here" and “No entry.” By using the hashtag #HungryMistakes, the Snickers stickers encouraged people to share their own experiences or found “fails,” giving this campaign great social legs.
What fun the agency must have had bringing this campaign to life while strongly reinforcing the brand messaging! Nonetheless, no virtually no breakthrough idea happens without criticism, and this campaign’s critics have called the stickers vandalism – even illegal. BBDO New York, the agency behind the Snickers stickers, claims the “ads” were only placed for the purposes of photography and quickly taken down. According to a spokesperson: “These were easy-to-peel-off stickers that were only up for a short period of time in order to capture the images included with real people in front of real mistakes. The branded stickers were taken down shortly after.”
True or not, the branding message is both sweet and sticky – much like the Snickers candy bar itself. And anything that generates this much chatter is the opposite of “fail” in the advertising industry.
~ Tracey Jeffas, Account Supervisor, The S3 Agency
