Brits love eating crisps, having the highest per capita consumption in the world and Walkers snacks brands (including Quavers, Wotsits and Monster Munch) had huge heritage of over 50 years in market. As a result, those who ate them as kids now had a nostalgic link as parents.

Walkers Snacks account for 30% of total Walkers masterbrand revenue, however over past years, sales had been lagging competitors, leading to market share declines and penetration losses. Despite their size, these brands had lacked communication for over 10 years, with low situational saliency being a key barrier for growth.

Re-awakening these sleeping giants became a must-win battle. However, rather than simply reminding of their existence, we went a step further to connect the brands with our parent target market by centering our comms around real, human insight.

Success would be measured by once-again becoming first choice for families and regaining lost penetration.

Our target audience for this campaign was families, they are the bullseye for these brands. However, using media principles pioneered by Byron Sharp and proven by Pepsico econometrics, a large proportion of our media was broadcast and not targeted to parents specifically. Everyone has a mouth, and Walkers have widespread appeal, so it was important that we did not reduce efficiencies by targeting too tightly. We therefore planned media with parents in mind, rather than following a heavily-targeted route.

Our media strategy was split into two phases: Fame & Talkability, and Launch. In the first phase, we planned to get parents talking about hiding snacks, using PR and influencers to connect with our audience. We then went big with our campaign launch, with the aim being to drive widespread awareness of the campaign, owning the hiding snacks insight and showing the nation the lengths parents go to hide their snacks.

We launched the campaign with a combination of influencer and PR to get people talking about our big insight. Influencer & inventor Colin Furze invented 3 snack-hiding devices, with a series launching on his YouTube channel boosted through paid media. We also worked with influencer Arron Crascall, who showed his devoted audience how he hides his Walkers. This was integrated with PR, when our killer research was dropped on the nation, including radio interviewing and an appearance on ITV’s This Morning.

We then kicked the campaign into overdrive, raising mass awareness of snack stash through reach-optimised TV and digital planning. Alongside our TV launch, our YouTube activity drove attention with a tailored creative which tasked our audience with spotting hidden snack bags. Finally, our social campaign used social-first assets that invited the nation to send in their innovative hiding places, with the best spot winning a year’s supply of snacks.

We wanted to get our message to as many people as possible, and a huge 88% of Brits saw the campaign, with a further 3m organic views on influencer content.

The results speak for themselves. Our key target was to accelerate sales growth on brands that had stopped growing, and we did just that, against a target of 5% growth, we achieved:

1. +19% growth overall snacks portfolio (Wotsits, Monster Munch, Quavers – featured in the ad)

2. +3.6MM Households recruited (more than 10% of the UK population)

3. +57% growth on Wotsits

A colossal jump for such large and established brands.

Reactions on social were very positive, with our audience particularly liking the relatability and humour of the campaign… the only downside: Parents will have to work even harder to stash their snacks now that Walkers has revealed their secrets.