The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- Snickers is leveraging gen A.I. in a campaign that is an innovation on the existing, classic “celebrity endorsement” marketing technique. But further analysis shows that this is also a form of interactive marketing as well. The celebrity endorser is José Mourinho. If that name makes you go “?”, be apprised that José Mourinho is a world-famous (in those parts of the world where football (if American, read: soccer) is widely popular) football/soccer manager. Obviously a big enough deal to get a Snickers campaign and multiple memes built from some of his media-facing sound bites. So, FYI.
- The A.I. campaign allows fans to get personalized videos of a gen A.I. José Mourinho talking about “own goal” moments–flubs and faux pas and gaffes that, and here is the “kicker” (pun definitely intended), are from the viewers’ “mates” (if American, or just not British, read: friends). This encourages the viewers to create personalized videos that they would specifically want to send to their friends.
- As far as content goes, the bounds of what personalized content a fan can expect to get seem brand-consciously strict. (Worth noting is that the brands in question are both Snickers the candy company’s corporate identity and José Mourinho’s “brand” as a public figure with something like a persona that fans parasocially construct based on bits and pieces of media they see of him.)
- Though the target market for this ad is ostensibly in the U.K. it will likely get much wider exposure from its potential for online virality–especially keeping in mind that people are going to try to get the most bizarre/outrageous/nonsensical/etc. responses from the A.I.
Snickers Sets the Dominos for Viral Marketing
To continue right from the last bullet point of the above potentially infinitely expansile Key Takeaways section, something that is worth noting here is whether Snickers’ selection of celebrity is directly related to that celebrity’s extant relation to internet-meme culture.
In fact, one of the memes linked to above comes from an advertisement. Here is a snippet of that advertisement.
If you did not click that link, do note that despite zero editing to the snippeted portion of the ad the YouTube video’s title is tellingly labeled “Original Meme” by the uploader. Key here is to realize that in the mind of the uploader, and most likely the minds of many people, it is almost as if it is not even ad content anymore.
Dig: that snippet of Ad Content enjoys this weird and complex thing that this writer, unaware of any official media-studies term if a term there be, will call a cultural object’s version of social mobility.
In this instance, the Ad Content moves on up into becoming Meme Content, which people seek out voluntarily at much greater rates than they do Ad Content.
From Marketing Content to Meme: The Plan for Snickers’ Ad?
So if a company is able to create Ad Content with both the potential for cultural-object social mobility along with inextricably visible and/or audible brand identifiers in the content, then there is a strong potential to get a high number of impressions for a brand.
Prithee, if you were sitting in a Fortune 500 company’s or one of its subsidiary’s boardrooms trying to dream up a marketing plan, would this potential for not just virality, but absorption of a brand’s marketing content into internet-meme culture not be something that you or your higher-ups would consider profitably exploitable?
The Making of an Interactive Ad-meme
The seeming accidental-ness of the “I am Josè Mourinho” meme speaks to the advertisers possibly not really planning for the Internet to make a meme out of a video that, nonetheless, is meant to grab the attention of an increasingly online target market.
Hence, the need to make sure that Ad Content designed to go meme-viral must have identifiable branding in the content.
Given José Mourinho’s rising star power in online meme culture, which is partly owed to an advertisement, it would only make sense that any company looking to capitalize on a marketing campaign that combines celebrity endorsement and interactive marketing would have this guy high on the list of Gets.
And get him Snickers got.
In Snickers’ gen A.I. ads, the celebrity endorser is loud-and-clearly holding a Snickers bar that is around the prominent lower-third text of “Mate scored an Own Goal [these last two words circled as if on a coach’s combo whiteboard/clipboard]”. So: the identifiable-branding box is checked. Consumers can act as “cocreators” that customize the meme to fit their purposes.
Do note that this ad content is in actuality a meme: it is inherently designed to be customized and spread by people.
But surely in the minds of many Internet users, outright calling this form of interactive marketing a “meme” would elicit an intuitive feeling of “not quite”. It feels more like an ad-meme, for complex reasons.
And so the market-researched gamble for Snickers is that with enough people meme-ing this ad-meme into being a mere (in a good sense) meme, then the branding stunt will pay off.
The Final Key Takeaway
Interactive marketing and celebrity endorsements, either in the form of isolated local stunts or widely disseminated campaigns, are nothing new. But A.I. is certainly adding new ways for businesses to pursue schemes and strategies in these marketing areas.
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