Crossy Road was one of the most popular mobile games of the year – it reached fifty million downloads in its first ninety days. To connect with this millennial gaming community, however, we couldn’t just brand a popular game or create a similar version ourselves. We needed to make KITKAT a partner.

So we found YouTube gaming vloggers Tbjzzle and miniminter, members of the group of gaming YouTubers called the Sidemen. They normally post footage of them playng various video games, and we wanted to give them a break, so they could make their fans breaks even better.

So instead of just playing their games on their consoles, we took one of their favourites – Crossy Road – and brought it to life. Crossy Road – for real. We created a huge obstacle course of the game, featuring KITKATs, and miniminter and Tbjzlle worked their gaming magic in real life.

We built a real life version of Crossy Road: our two YouTube stars brought some of their hardcore fans to join and support, while they battled it out. We created a short film, working with the YouTubers to ensure it resonated with their audience.

We created two films: one, a 30-second teaser that we ran on KITKAT social media and digital channels, and then a four-minute version that the YouTube stars posted on their channels.

The 30-second film was served on Facebook to a targeted demographic, and both versions were served on YouTube as pre-roll and on TrueView. All conversation was linked with the hashtag #mybreak.

• Once uploaded, the organic views racked up, with limited media support.

• Video received over 9 million views on YouTube.

• It finished 2016 as third highest performing ad on the YouTube leaderboard, outperforming many huge films released at Christmas, such as M&S and Waitrose and ahead of huge, celebrity-backed campaigns from Nike (Cristiano Ronaldo) and Virgin Media (Usain Bolt) which ran for Euro 2016 and the Olympics respectively. Only the expensively produced and highly backed ads by Sainsbury's and John Lewis scored higher.

• Best performing film ever tested on YouTube for consumer goods in UK: ad recall uplift and of 43.5% and best in class consideration uplift of 8.9

• Outperformed the norms of the category – more people completed the longer film than the shorter copy.

• +20bps across the campaign

• Growth ahead of total confectionery market - +4.7% vs +3.7%

• Increase in spend/buyer +11.4%