Starbar was a fairly new product, launched by Marabou as a direct competitior to Snickers. The objective was to win over current Snickers consumers: young men aged 18-25 (roughly 350,000 individuals). This target audience is one of the most challenging to target with traditional advertising, and the strategy was thus to reach them through social media. We decided on a gameification approach where we would generate consumer involvement through a challenge: 'Got what it takes to impress Megan Fox?' A meeting with Megan Fox is the ultimate prize for young men, and by challenging them to provide content to win this prize, we secured a massive amount of user generated content to be distributed through social media. To generate further viral spread, we teamed up with one of Sweden's most popular radio programs, also broadcasted on national television in the mornings. One of the hosts was enlisted to participate in the competition himself, uploading his own content. This generated further interest and reach of the campaign, and it was picked up by national as well as international media. In the end, the campaign reached over 60% of the target audience, with a sales increase of 16%.

The target audience was men aged 18-25 (350,000 individuals). The goal was to engage as many of them as possible to ultimately increase sales of Starbar. We looked at their media consumption and usage, identifying social media and especially user generated video content as key aspects of their consumption. We also indentified a number of key media houses and role models / spokespeople, and in the end decided to team up with one of Sweden's most popular radio shows, enlisting the host as a (secret) part of our campaign.

The campaign was prelaunched with a teaser trailer on Youtube. A week later, the competition opened to the public with a big bang. The only bought media was display-advertising and prerolls on Youtube. We seeded the campaign to blogger networks, and at the same time, the radio show The Voice started talking about the campaign. As content started pouring in, we seeded this to bloggers and media, and the top contenders received massive exposure in national media including being inlcuded on Sweden's biggest Web TV channel, Aftonbladet. The campaign ran for 3 weeks, and each week a new challenge was given by Megan Fox herself to maintain interest and buzz.

Out of a total target audience of approximately 350,000 people (Sweden only has 9m inhabitants), we got over 214,000 to visit the campaign site. Over 6,000 of these actually participated in the competition, contributing content. Consumers spent more than 10,000 hours on the campaign site, providing and rating content. With the content spreading in social and traditional media, we received a total of over 120m impressions, generating free media at an estimated value of over US$2m. During the campaign period, sales increased by 16% compared to the previous month.

Under the concept of 'no nuts, no glory', we challenged the target audience with the question, "Got what it takes to impress Megan Fox?" The campaign was a 3 week game challenging young males to upload cool, funny and interesting content to our campaign site. The best contributions would receive points and comments from Megan Fox herself, but you could also earn points by getting friends to vote for you. Extra points were awarded for including Starbar in the content, and you could even 'buy' extra points by redeeming purchased products, ensuring a direct link to sales.

Starbar is a new product in Marabou's portfolio, and was launched to win over users from Snickers, the long entrenched market leader within the segment of chocolate energy bars. The target audience, men aged 18-25, is hard to reach through traditional advertising messages, and furthermore buy products to a great extent on brand affinity. We needed a campaign that they would spread themselves, and that would create brand fame for Starbar.