Three key insights steered the creative solution: 1) Teens’ milk consumption is tied to how emotionally connected they feel to it, personified by the pleasure they get when drinking with their favourite foods; 2) Teens feel a lot of external pressures and seek downtime with friends to escape it; and 3) Teens dislike advertising and make every effort to avoid it.

So we aimed to give teens permission to relax and enjoy a glass of milk with their favourite foods when just chilling at home. To reinforce this behavior the creative idea was a cartoon web-series for teens to engage with in their natural entertainment environments. Titled “Snack Time”, every episode centres on a carton-shaped character joined by the snacks that go best with milk. The videos are unbranded with no traditional product shots nor a call-to-action.

A YouTube channel and site were created with a new episode released every 2 months. In the spirit of giving teens choice we used Promoted YouTube video, Skippable pre-roll and programmatic native to drive scale; complemented by other native platforms like Tumblr, in-game video and College Humor.

Teens also chill at the cinema, so we expanded reach by leveraging the four biggest teen films of the year – Hunger Games, Avengers, Jurassic World and Star Wars. For each movie a special parody-episode was created using our Snack Time characters, delivering added relevance and impact – Again, unbranded with no call-to-action.

For added impact we handed-out 20,000 Milk-shaped USB sticks to teen cinema goers, rewarding them with more content and driving to the YouTube Channel.

Finally, to bring it back to the online space we partnered with Buzzfeed to create a series of custom stories that linked each movie.

In the past year over 8 million YouTube channel views have been amassed with over 26,000 subscribers and counting (Canada only has about 3 million teens). Loyalty is evident as viewers who complete a video go on to view another 1.5 episodes.

Most importantly, Snack Time has contributed to lift in our brand and consumption goals, as evidenced in the following results:

1. Increased Brand Health: A 6.5% gain in brand metrics related to emotion, occasions, positioning and personality; and a 9% lift of teens who agree “milk is a fun drink”.

2. Increased Future Intent: 28.2% of teens exposed to Snack Time videos will drink more milk in the future, versus only 18.3% not exposed.

3. Higher Milk Consumption: Teens exposed to Snack Time videos consume 2.5 more milk servings per week than those who weren’t. Well above our extra half-glass a month target.