Synopsis

To drive deeper engagement with football fans, Snickers launched the Own Goal creative platform ahead of the Euro 2024 tournament - reminding hungry fans to satisfy their hunger if they want to avoid making embarrassing mistakes. 

 But we knew hungry fans wouldn’t really listen to a brand. They would, however, listen to one of the most iconic coaching legends of all time; José Mourinho - especially if he recorded and shared a personalised video message for mistake making friends in closed social groups as banter.

So we created the first authorised celebrity deep fake that fans could control. Sounds like we were asking for trouble, but by building a rigorous bespoke AI architecture that combined 3 AI engines and was trained on all of Jose’s post-match interviews - a brand and talent safe AI version of José was born as a Web App and a first of its kind WhatsApp bot.

Strategy

Snickers' UK market share has declined since 2019, particularly among younger consumers. 

Recognising football's popularity with this demographic and chocolate's appeal to sports fans, Snickers focused on strengthening its football presence. 

Building on its long-standing "You're not you when you're hungry" campaign, Snickers launched the ‘Own Goals’ platform in April 2024, aiming to address fans' football-related blunders, with Euro 2024 serving as a prime opportunity to engage a wide audience.

But rather than jostling for attention in traditional tournament sponsorship spaces, Snickers aimed to engage football fans in non-traditional, non-ad-funded spaces, where consumers spend nearly half their time. 

7 in 10 football fans now find the online fan banter more exciting than the football itself, so through Snickers’ brand positioning, iconic humour and Own Goals platform, the brand seized an opportunity to become a part of the banter.

The campaign recruited José Mourinho, known for his wit and one-liners, and cloned him using AI to create unlimited versions of "The Special One", trained to look, sound and even think like him. 

Fans could receive personalised, shareable videos of AI José roasting their friends' ‘Own Goals’, suggesting they might need a Snickers.

This was a pioneering use of AI that combined three cutting edge tools and an eight-stage brand safety pipeline, to generate limitless original videos mimicking Mourinho's personality to be shared to many. This first-of-its-kind AI architecture, combined with humans in the loop, helped to ensure not a single piece of generated branded content was unsafe.

Average brand dwell time was over 2 minutes, unparalleled time spent with the brand compared to average brand engagement time of 1.3 seconds on social media.

Once videos were generated, each video was viewed on average over 3 times through organic sharing and resharing on private social chats. 

By combining brand positioning, iconic talent, and innovative technology, Snickers created a fan-centric approach to amplify its message authentically, aiming to boost relevance among younger football fans during a major tournament.