Hungry Internet
Mars Wrigley
Issue 61 | January 2022
Agency
Thinkerbell
Creative Team
Head Creative Tinker Sean McNicholas Executive Creative Tinker Tom Wenborn Creative Tinker Matias Reyes Chief Tinker Adam Ferrier
Production Team
Head Production Tinker Di Nash Lead Production Tinker Naomi Nienaber Designer Jack Dinsmoor Editor Kevin Bolleteau Pre-roll Production Magnetizer
Other Credits
Lead Thinker Jamie Herman PR Tinker Tarah Miller Media Mediacom Client Marketing Director Ben Hill Portfolio Marketing Director Richard Weisinger Brand Manager Annie Cummins Regional Senior Manager, Brands & Content Kaitlin Williams
Date
September 2021
Background
The Internet is normally a highly-tuned, efficient and productive machine. Feeding you what you want before you know you want it. But what happens when the internet gets hungry? It starts acting a bit strange.
Idea
The internet isn’t the internet when it’s hungry. And now that Apple and other have deprecated cookies, the internet is getting confused.
For Snickers, after many years of seeing hungry and hangry big-name celebrities, it was time to show the effects on a nonhuman entity.
The brand, striving more than ever to stay contextual with its target audience now they live online, set out to demonstrate the effects of hunger by messing with the personality of the internet itself.
The Hungry Internet flipped online algorithms to feed people ads that were the exact opposite of what they would normally get. Every piece of confused content was a timely reminder to have a Snickers.
For instance, when cookies identified the audience was in Australia and was searching for ‘nearby’ activities, they were directed to the opposite side of the world in Russia.
Weather-based data: when it was cold and raining, the hungry internet suggested putting on sunscreen.
The idea was extended into a competition to guess Snickers’ password to their own Instagram account, which the internet had changed.
Results
Results unavailable at this time.
Our Thoughts
Display advertising is, more often than not, lower-funnel, direct response stuff. And it is usually creatively dire. This bucks the trend.
Firstly, it’s an upper funnel awareness idea, reinforcing the brilliant ‘You’re not you’ positioning and, secondly, it’s creatively damn clever. Actually, reading some of the comments about it on CampaignBrief it’s so clever a lot of people don’t seem to get it. Maybe they all have adblockers installed.
Most people in advertising seem to. Good work, Thinkerbell, for at least trying to do something smart and rewarding in digital.