New Snickers’ media plan includes celebrities and impulsive targeting

The Mars brand, Snickers opted for a new targeting approach called “impulsive targeting.” It aims to move away from more traditional ad-targeting techniques to figure out how people are feeling at a particular moment. “We’re learning how mood or how feelings drive behavior, so we’re organizing audiences around people’s level of impulsivity, and we’re trying to create relevant content and pop it into moments of impulsivity” said Dan Burdett, global brand director at Snickers, at the Ad:Tech conference in London. As most brands, Snickers is experimenting with programmatic buying and using contextually relevant creative to maximize reach. The goal is identifying when people are in the mood for a candy bar, by achieving this, the brand might avoid the traditional demographic targeting. While its You’re not you when you’re hungry campaign has featured celebrities from the outset, Burdett said it is exploring new partnerships for its content marketing. This could be done working with agencies like Twitch or partnering with celebrities like Luis Suárez and Jeremy Clarkson or YouTube creators. For 2015 Super Bowl, the brand launched a video featuring Steve Buscemi and Danny Trejo, which generated 2.5 million hits in social media.