When the FCC threatened to crack down on advertising sugary products during children’s TV programming, Mars Inc. and Ted Bates Advertising decided to market Snickers to teens as a snack food.
How do you transform a popular children’s candy bar into a snack food for teens?
Get the positioning right: First, promise hunger satisfaction instead of yummy taste. Second, explain that it’s the peanuts in Snickers that satisfy hunger. And never talk about Snickers like a candy bar. Only use words to describe Snickers that could be used to describe a Big Mac.
Get the message right: The first Snickers “hunger satisfaction” TV commercials were directed and produced by the Maysles brothers, a world renowned documentary team best known for “Gimme Shelter,” which documented the Rolling Stones’ 1969 U.S. tour. The commercials were shot on 16 mm film, rather than 35 mm, to give the commercials the look of cinema verite. In fact, the commercials were unscripted and featured teenagers who were not actors.
Sponsor the Olympics: The 1984 Olympic Games were held in the U.S. and they were the first games to accept corporate sponsorship. Mars Inc. paid $5 million to ensure global reach for their new M&Ms and Snickers brand strategies (happiness and hunger satisfaction, respectively). For Snickers, this was also an opportunity to draw real Olympic athletes into the advertising. It was complicated by the fact that Olympic athletes had to maintain their amateur status to remain eligible for competition.
The commercials for the 1984 Winter Olympics featured team members from the 1980 teams, including the captain of the famous U.S. hockey team that beat the USSR team. Once agreements were reached with the governing body for each sport, however, we were allowed to feature current team members.
For the 1984 Summer Olympics commercials, I interviewed athletes on every team but track and field, volleyball, and field hockey. My favorite athletes were the flyweight boxers. Our commercial featuring one of them was mentioned in Ad Age but I have yet to find it on the internet. As before, the commercials were unscripted.
