Instant Story Race
Mars Chocolate North America - M&M's
Issue 52 | September 2019
Agency
BBDO New York
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer, Worldwide: David Lubars Chief Creative Officer, New York: Greg Hahn Executive Creative Director: Tim Bayne Associate Creative Directors: Jenn Tranbarger, Jessica Rello
Production Team
EVP, Director of Integrated Production: David Rolfe Senior Interactive Producer: Danielle Amico Associate Art Producer: Lizzy Lehn Senior QA Engineer: Jimmy McGee Developers: Alex Massicott, Nick Russo, John Cardoso IT Infrastructure Architect: Nicholas DeWolf Animator: Henry Cho Production Company: House Special
Other Credits
EVP, Global Account Director, Mars Inc.: Susan Keller VP, Account Director: Ashley Gill Account Manager: Elizabeth Jacobs Account Executive: Jessica Dunne Business Manager: Paul Cisco EVP, Group Director, Behavioural Planning: Annemarie Norris Comms Planning Director: Brian Brydon Planner: Dexter Blumenthal Senior Project Manager: Jessica Cohn
Date
March 2019
Background
M&M’s was launching three new flavours to appeal to the adventurous tastes of their millennial audience. The task was to engage with this younger audience in a way that was as exciting and breakthrough as the flavours themselves.
Idea
Instagram Stories is the most engaging and popular feature of the platform, with over 68% of millennials tapping through it daily. Leaning into the insight that people quickly and mindlessly tap through Stories, the idea was ‘Instant Story Race’. Users tapped quickly through the brand’s organic, 100-frame Instagram Story, which featured Yellow running around the world in search of the new internationally-inspired flavours. The faster a user tapped, the faster Yellow ran. The first person to tap through the entire story won all three new flavours.
Using single-frame animation, the sequence of frames was easily mixed and matched to create three different races with three different endings, one for each of the three new flavours. Because of Instagram Stories’ time-sensitive nature, each race only lasted 24 hours, creating even more urgency for fans to play.
Results
Over 186,000 participants completed the races. Users spent an average of 2.42 minutes engaging with the brand resulting in over 450k minutes of total play time.
Community engagement and brand favourability reached an all-time high with 98,000 shares Helping the brand reach one million fans.
‘Instant Story Race’ outperformed industry standard for frames viewed per visit by 637% and got millennials talking about (and racing to try) M&M’s three new flavours.
Our Thoughts
What I love about this is it isn’t trying to be anything other than advertising. But rather than annoy those pesky millennials, the people who say they hate advertising the most, it seems to have delighted them.
How so? Because it has been cheeky and clever, behaving pretty much as they like to behave.
I’ve just been reading today that the network agencies are doomed. Not if they can find the sweet spot where brands, tech and entertainment all meet as BBDO New York does so frequently, hacking the internet for clients like Bacardi, Lowe’s and, here, M&Ms.