What happens when an artificial intelligence starts inventing data, offers crazy advice, or agrees with the user even when its approach doesn’t make much sense? The tech industry talks about hallucinations and other problematic behavior of models. Snickers has a much simpler diagnosis: the AI ​​is hungry.

The Mars brand has transferred its well-known platform “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” to artificial intelligence with Hungr.AI, an initiative developed together with BBDO that presents what the company defines as the first digital chocolate created specifically to “feed” an AI.

The idea is supported by some of the behaviors of generative assistants that have entered the popular conversation about this technology: confidently expressed incorrect answers, strange results, or a tendency to agree excessively with the user. Snickers interprets them from a territory that has been working in advertising for years: if someone starts behaving in an inappropriate way, maybe they just need to eat something.

A digital chocolate to “feed” the AI

Hungr.AI takes the joke beyond a communication campaign and allows you to interact with it. When an AI assistant starts offering unsatisfactory answers, users can go to the Snickers website, copy a digital candy bar, and paste it into the conversation to “feed it to them.”

After this gesture there are a series of prompts created to modify the interaction and guide the assistant towards a more satisfactory response.

The brand itself qualifies, however, the technological scope of the initiative. “There is functionality behind the experience, but we are not claiming that Snickers is literally fixing or improving AI tools, and we are not a technology company”explains Ashley Gill, Vice President of Brand and Content at Mars Snacking.
The joke, he points out, consists precisely in connecting a behavior that is already being talked about – such as the tendency of some attendees to be overly accommodating – with an idea that Snickers has been using for years: when you don’t behave like yourself, maybe you’re hungry.

In the United States, the action also has a physical extension. Those 18 and older who interact with Hungr.AI through Reddit or Snapchat can get a free real Snickers candy bar delivered via DoorDash, while supplies last. The promotion will be available until September 20.

From Betty White to AI hallucinations

The campaign’s interest is also in how Snickers updates a long-standing creative platform without changing its fundamental premise.

“You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” was born in 2010 and had one of its great showcases during Super Bowl XLIV with the memorable ad starring Betty White. Sixteen years later, the brand finds in the errors of artificial intelligence a new expression of that strange behavior caused, according to its creative universe, by hunger.

“Great brand platforms remain loyal and relevant no matter how much the world around them changes”explains Josh Gross, Chief Creative Officer of BBDO Chicago. “When we realized that AI’s strangest habits are quite comparable to the behavior of a hungry person, we couldn’t resist bringing ‘You’re Not You When You’re Hungry’ into the conversation.”
The next creative problem, Gross jokes, was figuring out “how the hell do you feed a Snickers to an AI?”

For Ashley Gill, that ability to adapt demonstrates the strength of a platform that can radically alter its executions while retaining an immediately recognizable idea. “The technology is new, the behavior is new, but that moment when ‘it’s not you’ is something that Snickers has been making its own for years.”he points out.

Hungr.AI is also presented through two spots, titled “Marathon” and “Tattoo”, produced by Good Behavior. The pieces bring to the audiovisual field the consequences of consulting a supposedly hungry artificial intelligence. The protagonists receive questionable advice in situations such as trying to run a marathon without having trained or considering getting a tattoo in an undesirable place.

“Like people, AI can sometimes behave in a way that doesn’t seem like itself and make funny mistakes: confidently giving the wrong answer, validating an absurd idea, or agreeing excessively”explains Gill. For Snickers, those behaviors offer an opportunity to participate in the conversation about AI failures without abandoning the territory it has built for more than a decade.

The head of Mars points out that the intention was not simply to introduce Snickers into a current technological conversation, but to identify a conversation that already exists and address it from a code unequivocally associated with the brand. “We’re still just doing what Snickers has always done: finding a fun, unexpected way to show that you’re not you when you’re hungry.”he points out.

Hungr.AI comes at a time when brands are exploring different ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into their communication strategies. Snickers has chosen to make the defects of technology itself the creative material of the campaign.

More info: Hungr.AI