Ten creative teams from around the globe work together with Mars to shape the future of global agile content

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 19, 2015 – A bold experiment pairing ten BBDO creative teams at YouTube Spaces in four international markets, has broken new ground in the ongoing search for clues regarding global storytelling and agile content creation. 

Working with Mars and its iconic TWIX global brand, BBDO creatives from around the world were challenged to help TWIX translate its successful “Left TWIX/Right TWIX” fictional rivalry strategy into visually powerful global storytelling that crosses borders.  As TWIX continues to be one of the fastest-growing global chocolate brands, especially among millennials, the brand was viewed as an ideal choice to bring this test to life.   

The work was created by BBDO teams from Brazil, Colombia, France, Germany, UK and US and produced over two days at the YouTube Spaces located in London, Los Angeles, New York and Sao Paulo.  They were tested in three international markets:  US, UK and Netherlands.  Each creative piece was evaluated for its ability to drive view thru rates and ad recall using YouTube’s proprietary TrueView format.  The ads were skippable and ran on a single day with a total of more than one million impressions per country.  Users who saw the ad were then shown a survey to determine ad recall.  The ads were also evaluated based on view-through rate (defined as when a user views an ad to :30 or the end of the ad, whichever comes first).  In both instances, a score of 10 was given to the highest performing ad on each of these criteria, and the best performing ad was determined by summing all scores across all three markets.

You can view the ten pieces of copy here.  A description of each ad can be found in the addendum.

Overall, the global video Create-A-Thon yielded the following observations/findings:

1. The Create-A-Thon challenged Mars/TWIX to evolve its creative approach to embrace agile content creation while reaching new consumers.  Each creative team had only 48 hours in which to produce, edit and finish its entry.  This meant shorter creative timelines, the need to make quicker decisions and a willingness to take risks to enable executional/creative freedom.
2.  The Create-A-Thon proved the value of a strong client/agency partnership.  To deliver work “good, fast, cheap,” which was pivotal to this experiment’s success, required that each partner trust one another and work together to move quickly to deliver commercial messages in real-time.  This is particularly relevant to today’s marketing world where content creators are being challenged to deliver commercial messages almost instantaneously.
3.  The “Create-A-Thon” showcased BBDO’s capabilities as a video storyteller.  All ten pieces of copy that were tested yielded positive ad recall for the TWIX brand; and 90% of the content performed in the top 50% of all YouTube ads that have been tested since the launch of Brand Lift.  Five of the ten even scored within the Top Quartile.
4.  There were no major geographical differences in the performance of the advertising across all three regions.  This confirms that TWIX’s “LeftTWIX/Right TWIX” insight is truly global.  Further, that visual storytelling, told well, crosses borders.
5.  In terms of individual creative executions, the UK approach (“YouTube vs YouTube”) was the top performing ad.  This was followed by “Minotaur” from BBDO New York and “Romans” from CLM BBDO in France.  These ads leveraged the TWIX rivalry story clearly from the outset.

Ad

Total VTRScore

Total Recall Score

Total Score

YouTube vs. YouTube

26

29

55

Minotaur

28

15

43

Romans

20

22

42

“As we drive toward achieving growth we are proud of being a bold fast-mover, thinking globally and taking creative risks is critical to our success,” said Jane Wakely Global CMO, Mars Chocolate.  “In partnering with BBDO and YouTube on this experiment, together we were able to further elevate our TWIX message through powerful storytelling told visually, via agile content creation and across borders.”

Added David Lubars, Worldwide Chief Creative Officer at BBDO, "The world is completely different now, everyone knows that, we’re in undiscovered country.  Standard ways of testing and evaluating work, well, a lot of it has become obsolete.  Now the most telling test is finding out if real people out there opt out on you after five seconds – to me, that’s real learning.  Working with YouTube and TWIX, we learned a ton about using creativity to keep people in; have them want to stick with you all the way through."

Based on these findings, TWIX is giving strong consideration to how best to use this successful content on a global basis, as well as how to apply the agile production learnings and implementation for future TWIX and other Mars brand projects.

“We are thrilled to partner with BBDO and Mars on this pioneering project designed to explore ways to create agile digital video content,” said Sadie Thoma, Head of Creative Agency Partnerships at Google.  “We’re even more thrilled that an approach that recognized the universal appeal of YouTube actually performed best of all the ads tested.  We look forward to continuing to work with BBDO and its clients to continue the crack the creative code of digital advertising in today's fast-moving, mobile first landscape.”