With www.SnickersSatisfies.com, Atmosphere BBDO is reaching out to a young audience with a variety of scenarios meant to satisfy. Does slapping an annoying lawyer sound like a release to you? How about plucking eyebrows or unraveling a sweater? These are among the 40 animated experiences that appear on the site, one per day. They are meant to offer visitors a moment of gratification. Perhaps then the viewer will reach out for the famous candy bar when he or she wants to curb his or her appetite.
The goal of the project is to engage America’s youth with a moment of pleasure sponsored by Snickers, according to senior creative director Arturo Aranda. The target demographic is teenagers from 16-19 years old and young adults from 20-24 years old. Careful not to create a Web site that felt like an ad, the creatives aimed for sincerity in the work, always keeping the short attention span of its audience in mind. “Whatever it looked like, we didn’t want it to feel like an ad,” Aranda related.
Each day, snickerssatisfies.com features an animated scenario, perhaps a woman choking and a man giving her the Heimlich Maneuver. To interact with the site in this example, a viewer simply clicks his mouse over the woman’s image. Then something begins to come out of the woman’s mouth. After repeated abdominal thrusts, a blimp is freed from her digestive tract and slowly floats off of the screen.
The humor in the project was meant to interest people with diverse tastes, especially since satisfaction is subjective. Aranda described the situations on the site as ranging from slapstick humor to banal encounters and fantastic scenarios. The latter is exemplified in illustrations like the Heimlich piece as well as one in which a sweater unravels and then the person wearing the sweater also starts to unravel. An example of an ordinary situation would be a person throwing pencils into the ceiling. Possibly one of the most cathartic pieces, which happens to involve some violence, features an irritating personal injury lawyer who is touting his services on television. With the computer mouse, a viewer can slap the attorney over and over again. Aranda related that the ability to take annoying things that happen in everyday life and do something about them was inherent in some of the concepts.
The senior creative director added that there is a lot to be said for shock value when you are trying to make something viral; things that make people a bit uncomfortable get them talking about the work. However, during the highly collaborative process of developing these concepts, the creative team was careful to omit scatological humor, which the client wanted to avoid.
SIMPLICITY
Making these experiences simple was as important as making them satisfying. “In the beginning, we actually had some very intricate interactivity with the pieces and we wanted them to be very broad reaching and be able to appeal to a mass audience,” Aranda said. “The problem is that if you make the interactivity too sophisticated, a lot of the people are going to get impatient, so we ultimately started building the interactivity to be very intuitive and all single-click based.”
Though the end result looks effortless, the development of the site wasn’t. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the process for coming up with each of these experiences, with forty interactive experiences, is not that different conceptually from creatively writing forty different TV spots, so it’s a lot of work,” Aranda said.
Though he has worked on online projects since 1994, this was a learning process for the creative. “It is rare that you actually get to take interactivity out of the realm of just clicking from one page to another,” he related. “It’s interesting to see what happens when you need to try to make a sweater unraveling interactive or trying to actually make plucking eyebrows online work or trying to make somebody skip a stone across the water in the interactive realm because there is the idea of it and then there are the practical issues of trying to make it work and making sure that it’s intuitive for everybody to understand how to make it happen.”
The site launched at the end of July and once each of the situations has appeared online, they will begin to rotate. Aranda pointed out that it is unlikely that a person would visit the site every day for 40 days, so viewers should continue to have fresh experiences.
Then, if they have found the satisfaction they seek, they have the option of sharing the encounter with a friend. They can even download a screensaver of the work. Word-of-mouth has actually been quite important to driving traffic to the site. The only other efforts to direct people to the page are from a URL that appears at the end of television spots tied into this campaign and a link on www.snickers.com. Soon, banner ads should start to run on the Internet.
Additional credit at the agency goes to: Andreas Combuechen, chief creative officer; the aforementioned Aranda and Eric Silver, executive creative directors; Brett Simon and Ron Lent, art directors; Donovan Goodly, junior art director; Susan Phuvasitkul, copywriter; AND Dave Kurman, account supervisor.