In a challenging financial year driven by rising headwinds and reduced marketing budgets, KitKat needed to change their approach on how to keep the brand relevant and top-of-mind. The brand needed to speak to the growing Gen Z audience in more cut-through, unexpected ways and reinforce the key brand message around taking breaks. The objective was to drive higher engagement for less investment per creative asset.

With generative AI dominating the conversation right now, KitKat saw this as the perfect opportunity to tackle their business challenge. After 65 years of telling people to ‘Have a break’, it was the perfect excuse for the brand to hijack the conversation and promote their iconic slogan by demonstrating it themselves. If KitKat could leverage AI to do all the marketing work, it meant the brand and their agency partner could sit back and take a break.

The idea behind ‘Have AI Break’ was simple - KitKat let AI do the marketing work so the brand and their agency partner could sit back and ‘have a break’. The technological advancement around AI and ChatGPT becoming open source was the perfect opportunity for KitKat to live their own brand message.

KitKat needed a campaign to speak to Gen Z and keep KitKat top of mind - but with a smaller investment than in previous years. The prominence and accessibility of OpenAI was a perfect solution to this challenge: ChatGPT-3’s source of data consists of textbooks, websites, various articles, and human interaction. By strategically leveraging ChatGPT’s wealth of information and ability to create original scripts, we were able to use a few simple prompts to generate countless executions that were tailored to resonate with the audience. At the same time, the idea reinforced KitKat’s key brand message of ‘having a break’. These scripts were turned into short films that ran across the main mobile channels (Instagram/YouTube/TikTok) the audience engage with.

Have AI Break’ was all about working smarter, not harder. With minimal effort using simple prompts, we were able to generate endless fresh and original content for KitKat - using ChatGPT for scripts, and Dall-E2 to generate matching visuals. It was an innovative way to tackle our business objective of driving engagement with Gen Z using limited investment in both time and money. The medium made for a topical and unexpected way of the brand living its infamous ‘Have A Break’ slogan.

Countless unique films were generated for each mobile platform - 6 second, 15 second, 10 second, and longer Reels formats across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

The campaign targeting Gen Z had a positive impact on the brand's reach, engagement, and perception. The films generated high levels of social media reach and engagement across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, exceeding the KPIs on every platform, especially on TikTok by 5X, with a total 20 million impressions in 2 weeks.

Using AI-generated content allowed the brand to produce more relevant and unique films for little effort, reinforcing the key brand message around breaks. With ChatGPT and Dall-E2 being free to use, it delivered on the business objective of driving engagement for less investment per creative asset.