At the heart our success is an enduring idea – to bring the smile in your break. But breaks have changed, consumers increasingly having their breaks on social media timelines. That’s why KITKAT seize social ‘moments’ to create fast, fresh and clever social content. Content that can get produced quickly, grow big fast and importantly keep the brand salient – vital in confectionery, where consumers decide what they purchase in real-time themselves.

This approach ensures we are bringing smiles into where our audiences are having a break, on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The combination of a big trending story on Twitter, our break position, our audiences obsessive love of mobile technology and our association with Android helped to ensure that this real-time event was a perfect storm for some sharp reactive KITKAT wit.

With Twitter and reactive content speed and wit is key. We simply identified the perfect storm of a big trending story on, a strong creative opportunity for our break position, our audiences obsessive love of mobile technology and the KITKAT/Android association and moved as fast as Twitter itself. Within 30 minutes we had reacted to the story and hit over 1000 retweets within an hour, using a simple cheeky snapping KITKAT finger, the trending hashtag and a punchy line of copy. After 27 hours of organic growth we sustained the tweet’s momentum with a minimal amount of promoted tweets.

KITKAT was one of the first brands to tweet the story; creating over 27,000 retweets (19,093 organic and 8,235 promoted), 14,500 favourites and 4000 new followers in 72 hours, making it nearly twice the size of Oreo´s Dunk in the Dark Superbowl teewt.

The activity also received massive PR coverage; the stories themselves shared thousands and thousands of times, Adweek’s stories alone generate over 11,000 shares. With media coverage ranging from Sky News to Bloomberg we created tens of millions of earned media impressions, even Apple’s share price dipped. All from 30mins quick reactive thinking.