Company: The Hershey Company
Campaign: #KitKatChallenge with musical.ly
Agency mix: Ketchum (media relations), Anomaly (digital/social), Collab (talent partnership)
Duration: November 24 - 27, 2016
Building on the success of Chance the Rapper's remake of the classic Kit Kat "Give Me a Break" jingle, Hershey challenged fans to lip-sync the tune on social networking app musical.ly.
The brand tapped several music-related social influencers to help push the campaign, ending up with 60,000 video submissions in just four days.
Strategy
Hershey began looking at the musical.ly app for a possible campaign with Kit Kat in early 2016, eventually ramping up efforts in September.
"We knew that [musical.ly] had a younger demographic and that they had a loyal fan base," explained Noelle Perez, The Hershey Company’s senior manager, global marketing and digital advancement. "With it being a music platform and the fact we had a new jingle, it was also really an opportunity for our younger fans to hear the new jingle."
The campaign team had the idea of developing a video challenge for musical.ly users to film themselves lip-syncing the Chance the Rapper jingle, which debuted back in October. The Thanksgiving time-frame was specifically chosen because it is a heavy traffic time for the app with users, particularly students, off for the holiday and looking for fun ways to entertain themselves.
The musical.ly platform would serve as the primary hub for the custom page created for the challenge. The aim was to generate at least 40,000 user-submitted videos.
In addition, the campaign team looked to tap a few social influencers in the music space to promote the challenge across social channels using the hashtag #KitKatChallenge.
Tactics
Musical.ly’s creative agency, digital talent network Collab, partnered with social media influencers Bart Baker and Allicattt to build hype for the challenge. Baker has more than 1.1 million followers on Twitter and Allicattt has more than 610,000 followers on Instagram.
The two influencers created Twitter and Instagram posts of themselves performing the lip-sync challenge to increase awareness and encourage participation.
The campaign officially launched on November 24, 2016. Hershey’s PR team, with help from digital agency Anomaly, created a custom challenge page on the musical.ly app. Thousands of app users submitted lip-sync videos over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Branded Hershey's and Kit Kat social channels shared the influencer content to drive participation among fans.
You saw mine, now show me how you take a break! #KitKatChallenge @KitKat_US https://t.co/81aoKXU3NW #Ad
— Bart Baker (@BartBaker) November 25, 2016
"The core of the campaign really was to test the musical.ly platform for The Hershey Company," said Perez. "We want to make sure that we are testing new platforms that have never been done within the organization that could potential drive our business forward."
Results
The #KitKatChallenge received more than 60,000 total submissions on the musical.ly platform, exceeding the campaign team's goal by 20,000 videos. Challenge submissions on the app generated nearly 22 million views.
Influencer content garnered more than 1.6 million views and helped the Kit Kat musical.ly channel gain more than 54,000 followers.
According to musical.ly, the #KitKatChallenge was the most successful campaign run on the platform with a duration less than seven days in length.
