You’re not you when you’re hungry has been embedded in culture by so many ads and in the last few years. The idea that you make mistakes when you’re hungry is still being promoted in commercials. There have been some wonderful evolutions of the idea. This one, by Impact BBDO in Dubai, is outstanding. It’s Hunger Insurance, and yes it’s real. It covers people for the mistakes they make when they’re hungry and pays out in Snickers bars.
In the campaign, the payout depends on the severity of the mistake, from 2 Snickers bars all the way to 50. To make a claim, customers are directed to the website, speak to the Hunger Insurance chatbot agent, provide a few details of their hunger mistake, and receive a coupon for payout of Snickers.
The campaign was publicised with a parody infomercial:
https://youtu.be/7GNR2XCdXb8
“The things is, up until today, Snickers has only ever really tried to help people avoid being out of sorts due to hunger but we know sometimes this is just inevitable, what then? So we decided to evolve a little and to take our campaign in a slightly different direction,” stated Ibrahim El Tawil, Snickers brand manager, Saudi Gulf.
Snickers worked with real insurance underwriters and risk analysts to develop an algorithm to assess claims – factoring in things like time of day, mood, location, frequency and severity of the blunder. This data was then fed into an AI chatbot which analysed thousands of keywords linked to hundreds of hunger-related incidents. These factors then worked out a unique payout amount for each individual claim.
“This campaign put a very different spin on traditional 1+1 promos, that historically only offered financial value to consumers with no real benefit to brand equity and allows us to actually build equity with our promotions using our global creative platform. We achieved all this while also building a strong collaborative relationship with a key retail partner that would usually be uninterested in executing such equity building activities,” El Tawil added.
During the campaign period, there was an uplift of 18% in weekly sales of Snickers, and a 21% increase in foot traffic in participating retail stores. There was also a 30% rise in brand associations with “hunger”.
