CATEOGORY: Interactive Web Game
FIRST-PLACE CAMPAIGN: Nestlé Butterfinger’s “Dude, Where’s My Bar?”
AGENCY: Threshold Interactive
CLIENT: Nestlé Butterfinger
Nestlé asks Butterfinger lovers to help find Seth Green’s missing bars
In the 1990s, generating market share for Nestlé’s Butterfinger brand was fairly easy. The Simpsons were hot and everyone loved the vignettes with Bart saying “Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfinger.” But as all great campaigns do, the Simpsons theme matured and the brand needed something fresh and new.
Meanwhile, at the turn of the new millennium, the sector began to grow and a flood of new product launches entered the market backed by heavy spending. Suddenly, competitors were outselling Butterfinger 10 to one and the brand was flat and losing market share.
“We needed to build the brand back up and remind people that we were out there,” said Daniel Jhung, marketing manager for the Butterfinger brand at Nestlé. In addition, he explained, confectionery is generally an impulse buy and marketing candy required constant creative thinking for getting the brand in front of people and incenting them to purchase.
Capitalizing on their classic tag line, they took the “Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfinger” phrase out of Bart Simpson’s mouth and put it into the mouths of consumers through an alternate reality game (ARG) hosted by Seth Green, a pop culture icon known for his role on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” as spokesperson.
The promotion began with a video released on YouTube showing Green having an explosive rant on a production set, then walking off. In the parking lot, he is mugged — also caught on videotape — and the muggers steal his vintage Butterfinger, which his grandfather gave him when he was a child and has brought him luck getting acting parts ever since. A ransom note shown by a tearful Green in a follow-up video says that if he doesn’t play along with the mugger’s little game, they’re going to destroy his precious bar at midnight on Halloween. The thief turns out to be Green’s evil twin brother who was jealous all along that his grandfather gave the bar to Seth and not him. Green asks consumers to help him get his bar back.
“The top goals of the campaign were deeper consumer engagement and letting consumers own the tag line through broad reach within social media,” Jhung said.
Six different game puzzles were rolled out over a three-week period from Oct. 13 to Halloween. A seeding strategy used 14 videos to distribute the narrative thread to mass market press, celebrity gossip sites, entertainment media, the ARG community and the campaign’s two core Web sites, http://www.DudeWheresMyBar.com and http://www.ItsMyButterfingerNow.com.
To tie in with the fact that Seth’s evil twin felt he was betrayed by the brother he thought he knew, a Facebook game was launched called “Can you lay a finger on the pulse of your friends”? The game scraped a person’s Facebook page for information about their friends and then asked questions such as, ‘What college did Suzie go to?’ to see how much people new about their friends. Then, during the week leading up to Halloween, players used a Google Earth-like program to zoom in on a graveyard for clues on where evil twin had hidden the bar.
“The game was very interactive, fun, innovative and original,” Jhung said. “It became very viral because you wanted to check it out and tell your friends.”
In the last week, Nestlé launched an additional component in which the evil twin steals Green’s secret stash of 100,000 Butterfingers from a vault in his basement and releases them to Circle K stores. Green pleads with his followers to go out and retrieve all 100,000 bars, which have special wrappers denoting them as Seth Green’s bars.
For the first time in four years, Butterfinger gained 5% share over the previous year. Dollar growth was up 10%— almost 2-1/2 times the category average. The campaign earned more than 160 million press impressions, 1 million unique visitors, 4 million video views and made Ad Age’s viral video chart as No. 2 in October. The Facebook app was in the top 1% of all Facebook apps for the month of October with average campaign participation at 2:27 minutes. In addition, Circle K stores saw a 74% lift in Butterfinger sales that month compared with the typical 10% prior to the campaign. —Lynn Russo Whylly
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