A funny thing happened on the way to the confectionary: Sweets manufacturer Mars Inc. launched an ad campaign and forgot to sell the candy.
The spots – can’t really call them ads, for they don’t seem to be advertising anything – feature one word apiece, and that word has been tricked out in the colors of a Snickers bar – brown background, orange border and blue letters. (I don’t have that color scheme memorized: I logged on to the Mars Inc. Web site to check.)
The words are supposed to evoke some sort of…
Well, that’s really the problem with this campaign. Because the words – nougatocity; peanutopolis; hungerectomy; satisfectellent; substantialiascious – don’t really evoke anything. When combined with the color scheme, they are supposed to keep Snickers in front of a snacker’s mind.
The campaign fails because it simultaneously doesn’t go far enough, and goes too far. The attempts at wordplay are so general that they could be applied to any product, or are off the mark when they’re specific.
Substantialiascious? Satisfactellent? These could just as easily be selling boil-in-a-bag fettuccini Alfredo. Peanutopolis? A city of peanuts? Absent an earlier Snickers campaign (“Packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies”) there’s no context for this word. I suspect most consumers don’t want to live in Peanutopolis.
Hungerectomy may be the cleverest wordplay in an unclever lot. This product, this unnamed product, will remove your hunger (assumedly using its nougatocity: I can’t see how its peanutopolis would help in this situation.) But what points it gains for removing hunger it loses by being, well, disgusting. A surgical procedure to remove hunger? Note to copywriters: If it’s a food product, try not to evoke Cohen & Powderly’s “Infectious Diseases, Second Edition” in your copy.
Relying on the colors and font to evoke Snickers is another mistake. Let’s face it: This ain’t the Golden Arches of Micky D’s. If one is already familiar with the product the brand is reinforced. But these colors are remarkably similar to those used by the Cleveland Browns football team.
Maybe that’s supposed to be a tipoff as to how it performs a hungerectomy. Perhaps whatever this is will tackle your hunger, throw it down to the turf, and for good measure stomp its fingers a few times before allowing it to rise from the pile.
This scenario couldn’t be any worse that what Mars actually proposes as a definition. (The definitions can be found in pages on the Snickers site http://www.snickers.com/hungerectomy.asp, etc.). So what’s a hungerectomy? The good people at Mars Inc. have defined it as “A highly precise procedure involving your hunger getting punched in the face, dragged into an alley, and robbed.” Uh, MY hunger? Thanks, guys, but I like my chocolate without assault.
“Satisfectellent” is listed as “A word used when something really good happens to you and you become so happy that you’re confused.” Huh? Satisfectellent seems to be a merging of “satisfaction” and “excellent” with an extra “t” thrown in the middle for good measure (or bad copyediting. It’s hard to tell.) Where did confusion come in, unless a third word, “feckless,” is supposed to be in the middle of it. I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t care.
If the actual words weren’t unfortunate enough, the back-end strategy of this campaign leaves a lot to be desired as well. Top-level URLS (nougatocity.com, etc.) all seem to be available. In addition to being more accessible to the consumer, reserving and using these URLs might also have ensured top placement in search engine results. As it is, typing any one of these words into Google results in essays mocking the campaign being served up as the highest-placed results.
The final ingredient this campaign is missing is an interaction mechanism, in which Snickers site visitors could coin and define their own neologism. I don’t think this was an oversight. I think whoever designed this campaign knew that the average visitor could come up with words a lot more clever than what’s been offered.
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