The Snickers 2010 Super Bowl spot featuring Betty White was a game-changer for more reasons than one.
Besides reviving her career — though she is still best known for her role as Rose Nylund in NBC sitcom The Golden Girls (1985-1992) — the iconic advertisement also helped the company’s global sales increase by 15.9% within its first year and grow its market share.
The commercial was the first made for Snickers’ campaign and tagline, “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” The creatives behind the phrase: Peter Kain, who wrote the copy, and Gianfranco Arena, the spot’s art director. Today, the creatives work for BBDO New York as executive creative directors, with Arena going from full-time to freelance in 2021. Additional credits include producer Amy Wertheimer and director Craig Gillespie. Kain sat down with Campaign to share how it all came together.
While brainstorming the tagline and spot for Snickers, Kain said that he and Arena were trying to figure out “who represents hunger in different ways.” He added that their thought process was thinking of celebrities whom everyone knew and loved, but were also “the kind of people you wouldn’t normally see in a commercial.”
“Snickers has a history of doing creative work telling stories about hunger satisfaction,” he continued. “So, we thought that hunger was one good place to go. And from there, we realized hunger can kind of throw you off in different ways. And maybe those different symptoms of hunger can be personified somehow.”
Celebrities such as Joe Pesci and the late Aretha Franklin came to mind, but Kain said White was the “star” of one of the first scripts written for the commercial.
“I always loved The Golden Girls,” he explained to Campaign. “I feel like it’s one of the best-written shows ever, and [White] was so great in it.”
Shooting only took one day, but it was five weeks before Super Bowl XLIV. Kain admitted it was “total chaos,” but he had confidence in the production partners to finish the spot in time.
“[Gillespie] has a lot of experience doing visual effects and stunts, and so we trusted that he would pull this off in time,” he added.
The team also had White try out different lines that they came up with on set. According to Kain, the objective was to come up with something a teenage boy would say that could be funny coming from America’s sweetheart.
“She was awesome,” he said. “She just nailed each [line]. She perfectly channeled the mannerisms and voice of a grumpy teen ‘bro.’ [Even] her posture of just looking like an exasperated dude helped, too.”
Despite filming only taking a day, Kain said that there was a lot of sitting around in-between takes due to the large amount of setup needed for the stunts (such as the one where White was tackled into the mud). Usually, he mentioned, celebrities will go into their trailer when this happens. But not Betty White.
“She sat with us all day,” he said. “We got to talk about her career and The Golden Girls and her love of animals, and she was right in it with us. She was such an amazing comic actor [and] very down-to-earth. It was a great experience.”
Snickers’ recent spots no longer feature celebrities. Instead, the writers and directors behind them utilize an aspect that Kain considered helped the ads stand out: “playful meanness.”
“It’s a little edgier than what other CPG brands might be,” he explained. “That’s what makes it stand out, and that’s what makes people remember. “Giving [White] mean kind of jabs to say at her friends feels real and doesn’t feel like advertising as much.”
Another aspect that the creative teams behind Snickers’ advertisements took from the Betty White spot is the goal to “make everybody understand the story and laugh.”
“Don’t be so niche that you’re only talking to one audience,” Kain said. “This is a product anyone can appreciate.”
Snickers and BBDO New York’s Betty White spot is in the final round of Campaign Cup, a March Madness-esque bracket competition to determine the best American advertisement of the 21st century. The voting portal will close on Wednesday, May 14.
