Twinkies is the number 1 cake in the Egyptian market in its category. The problem was the competitors were copying every move Twinkies made throughout the years including copying the packaging design, and that confused the consumer and harmed Twinkies sales. As a brand Twinkies move was to change the old packaging design, to stand out again in the middle of the clutter created by those copycats. And we had to find a way to spoil the opportunity for them to copy the new packs as well, while staying in line with Twinkies’ tone of voice “the kindest cake out there”.

Instead of fighting Twinkies' competitors, we decided to lend them a hand, or at least pretend like we are. We shot 4 short films using the fans’ favorite Akram Hosny as the Twinkies representative, to announce the new packaging, and invite everyone including the compititors bluntly to rip it off. We went to the extent of announcing the website “esra2twinkies.com” -which translates to stealTwinkies.com- that makes it even easier for them to copy and put any name they want on the pack and use it as their own.

The UX was pretty straight forward, giving everyone the chance to change the color, the font size, and write anything they want on the pack. We also made sure it has a kitschy-like design to stay true to the exact experience one would get if they went to rip off a design in a lowbrow design studio.

Based on our knowledge of Gen Z, they couldn’t care less about Twinkies changing its packaging design. So, we knew this piece of boring news had to be part of an experience. Keeping this in mind, alongside the fact that Twinkies is positioned as the kindest cake in the market, we decided to turn the copycats problem into something we can benefit from. Creating an engaging experience for Twinkies’ consumers to keep them interested, we pretended to invite Twinkies’ competitors to steal the new packaging design on esra2twinkies.com out of the goodness of our hearts. Knowing that Twinkies’ everyday consumers would be the main participants making those fake packs and sharing them everywhere, nothing was left for Twinkies’ competitors to snatch.

With hard to miss silly situations, starring the target’s favorite celebrity Akram Hosny, we started the journey with announcing in 4 films the new package designs. We drove Twinkies’ competitors and audience with a direct call for action to steal those new designs through a URL, that takes them to a kitschy-like designed website where they can rip the designs off with very simple tools, and share them on social media. We made sure our message was single minded and optimized our copies to fit on all social media platforms to cut through all the clutter, not only to grab the target’s hard-to-grab attention, but also to encourage them to engage with our website and deliver our message.

In less than two months, we reached a total of 21 million views, 330K+ visits to the website, and around 60K ripped off Twinkies packages. While twinkies’ portfolio grew 61% than last year. Now it’s been 4 months since the release of the campaign, and no fake packages from the competitors has surfaced in the market.