Snickers has not kept a 2010 upload alive on its own channel, so both links are reuploads and both were checked today. If one dies, search "Snickers Betty White The Game". Watch for Abe Vigoda taking a hit in the second half of it.
A chocolate bar has no meaningful product story. Snickers is peanuts, caramel, nougat and chocolate, and has been for ninety years. There is no innovation to announce, no reformulation, no reason to prefer it that would survive contact with a sceptical adult. Worse, it is an impulse purchase. Nobody plans to buy one. The decision happens in about two seconds at a till, from memory, with no consideration at all.
Which tells you exactly what the advertising has to do, and it is not persuasion. It is fame and recall. The brand has to be the thing that arrives in your head unbidden at the counter, which means the job is to be widely known, instantly recognisable and pleasant to think about, in as many countries as possible, forever.
The human truth BBDO landed on is small and universal in the way the good ones always are: hunger changes your personality. You are short with people. You are useless at your job. You are not, briefly, yourself. Everyone has been that person and everyone has had to deal with that person, and unlike almost every insight in confectionery it does not need translating.
When you are hungry, you literally turn into someone else. Cast a famous person as the someone else.
The Super Bowl debut is a scrappy game of American football in the mud. One player is playing terribly. His teammates round on him, and he is Betty White, then 88 years old, being driven face first into a puddle. His girlfriend hands him a Snickers. He bites it and becomes himself again. In the same spot, another player is Abe Vigoda.
This is a mechanic, not a slogan, and that distinction is the entire reason it is still running sixteen years later. The line does not describe a benefit, it describes a swap, and a swap is a machine that generates ads. Take any situation, any market, any famous face, and the format holds: a person is behaving badly, they are revealed to be a celebrity, chocolate restores them.
So it scaled the way almost nothing scales. It has run in more than seventy countries, and each one casts its own local icon rather than dubbing an American film that will not land. The joke survives translation because the joke is structural, not verbal. It is also endlessly extendable into other media: the same logic ran on Twitter as the brand's misspelled and increasingly unhinged tweets that resolved once it "ate", and it stretched to the Marilyn Monroe Super Bowl spot, the Rowan Atkinson kung fu film, and dozens more.
And the casting is doing the heavy lifting on fame. Betty White in 2010 was a very deliberate choice: adored, unmistakable, and the least plausible person on earth to be playing tackle football. The spot topped USA Today's Ad Meter, and it is widely credited with kicking off the late-career Betty White renaissance, which is a strange thing for a chocolate bar to have caused.
The stupid: launch a global repositioning for a ninety-year-old brand, on the most expensive airtime in the world, by having an 88-year-old woman tackled into mud. Show no product benefit whatsoever. Make no claim about taste, ingredients, size or satisfaction. Build your entire global platform on a joke structure, which is the thing every marketing textbook warns you wears out, and then commit to running it in seventy countries.
The smart: for an impulse product, fame is the strategy, and a joke that travels is the cheapest fame there is. But the real discipline is in the shape of the idea rather than the execution. "You're not you when you're hungry" is a brief disguised as a line: it tells every agency in every market exactly what to make without telling them what to say, so the platform stays consistent while every execution stays local. That is why it did not wear out. Most campaigns are one ad that has to be repeated. This one is a rule that generates new ads, and rules do not get boring at the rate ads do.
The steal: do not write a line that describes your product. Write a rule that produces ads. If your idea cannot generate its own next execution without you, it is a commercial, not a platform, and you will be back in the room in eighteen months.
The unglamorous lesson underneath it is about holding your nerve. The temptation with a platform this productive is to freshen it every few years, because the client gets bored long before the public does, and the agency gets bored before the client. Mars did not. Sixteen years and one line. Almost every campaign that fails does so because somebody changed it while it was still working.
We also like that it is genuinely, reliably funny without ever being clever about it. There is no wink, no irony tax, no visible pride in the writing. It just commits to the bit and casts it perfectly. That is much harder than it looks and it is the reason the format has survived being copied by everyone.
Straight talk: these are unusually good numbers to be able to quote, because they are not case-film puffery. They come out of the Effie and IPA Effectiveness submissions, which means an independent jury read the underlying evidence, and they were later written up in the trade press and by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, whose whole institutional habit is being unimpressed by marketing claims. "Grew share in 56 of the 58 markets it ran in" is the one to hold onto: a single campaign can get lucky in one market, but not in fifty-six.
The one number to treat carefully is the award total. You will see "47 Lions" quoted, which counts the whole platform across many years and many markets, not the 2010 launch. At the point the effectiveness case was written it was 13 Cannes Lions.
Plus two Emmy nominations, the first ever Super Bowl Clio, and the number one slot on USA Today's Ad Meter for the launch spot in 2010.
Client: Snickers, Mars Incorporated
Agency: BBDO New York, with BBDO worldwide on the global rollout
Launch spot: "The Game", Super Bowl XLIV, February 2010
Talent: Betty White and Abe Vigoda
Still running: in more than seventy markets, each casting locally
Credit lists for a platform this old and this distributed get unreliable fast, with different names attached in different write-ups, so we have kept this to what is solidly documented rather than guessing at individual creatives on the launch film.
Campaign, the effectiveness case study
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, on how fame did the work
The Drum, on the launch
Ipsos, the ad testing on the Super Bowl spot
The One Club, the award record
System1, a later effectiveness read on "The Game"
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: