When you're hungry you get confused and take stupid decisions. It’s true even when you are funding or buying something online. In China, hundreds of stupid ideas and products get funded through online crowdfunding platforms. The people who are investing in these ideas are really stupid or maybe they are just hungry? We decided to find out.

We created innovative projects on JD Finance (China’s Kickstarter). While they were absolutely terrible ideas, they seemed legit at first glance. These were based on hot tech topics: Eco friendliness and product design.

The project demo videos were designed to be shared beyond the JD Finance platform to drive traffic to the crowdfunding project page. The moment one tried to pledge, a message popped up on their screens, reminding them that "You get confused when you're hungry", with an option to convert whatever they pledged in money into bars of Snickers.

The projects were an environmentally friendly Eco-Fan - a fan that derives all its power directly from the power of the wind; and the Aspire Ventilated Rain Ponch - rainwear that is completely covered in breathing holes. Each project was created on JD Finance in full earnest, complete with project demo videos where the inventors demonstrated why their project was such a good idea.

When consumers pledged for the projects (either knowingly or unknowingly), we knew they must have been hungry. So the amount pledged translated into Snickers bars, which we sent to them. In fact, we turned crowdfunding into a new e-commerce channel for Snickers!

In the end, we saved thousands of online crowdfunders from making a hungry mistake and exchanged over 30,000 bars of Snickers in just 2 weeks (Total amount pledged: RMB 360,285. The online impressions numbered more than 550,000 over the same period. Truly there are many hungry-crowdfunders out there!