Fun and hand shandies on Planet Mars

Ads for Mars products have gone bonkers. What’s going on, wonders Dominic Mills

I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest ads from confectionery brand Maltesers. They’ve been running in and around C4’s coverage of the Paralympics.

There are three, and each features a disabled actor recounting a ridiculous real-life incident. In one, a deaf mute uses sign language to describe how her boyfriend’s dog ate her hearing aid – and how he plans to return it to her once he’s dug it out of a pile of dog shit.

In another, a wheelchair-bound girl talks about getting ‘frisky’ with her new boyfriend. Unfortunately (or not, from her boyfriend’s point of view), she then has a spasm which turns into a hand shandy – demonstrated by shaking an open pack of Maltesers.

Wow. This is daring stuff, pushing hard at the boundaries for what is, after all, a mainstream product. Some may find it even more surprising that they are from a Mars-owned brand.

Mars advertising used to be a byword for stuff that sat somewhere on the border between tedious and soporific. Think Milky Way – ‘the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite’ (oh yeah); or Mars Bar – ‘a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’. As dull even as old-style P&G ads.

As with the advertising, so with the corporate culture. Mars was deeply conservative, cautious, secretive and seemingly peopled by clones. I used to hate talking to them. “Lovely day,” you’d say to break the ice. “No comment,” they’d go.

Mars was (and is) a family company and much of this came from Forrest and John Mars, the sons of the founder. In the 50s he, along with adman Rosser Reeves, pioneered the USP style of advertising: find a product-led point of difference and hammer it home relentlessly. You can see how it lived on in those Mars bar and Milky Way ads.

One of Reeves’ first ads positioned Maltesers as the ‘chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hand’. How uninspiring was that?

But modern-day Planet Mars…what’s going on? Has somebody slipped something into the water? Across the piste, ads for Mars products have gone bonkers, but in a good way.

It’s as different as it would be if a government run by Puritans was replaced by one run by acid heads. An instruction has gone out to its agencies: “We don’t care what mind-altering substances you take, but have fun.”

The Snickers ads featuring diva Joan Collins are one example – based on the insight that we lose control when we’re hungry, all the better for it – and have spawned a host of brilliant spin-offs.

My favourite is the Snickers ‘Hungerithm’ from Australian agency Clemenger BBDO. It posits that when the internet gets angry (i.e. trolling etc) it is because it’s hungry.

The agency built the ‘Hungerithm’ – an algorithm that analysed social posts to determine when the internet was angry. When it was, users could download money-off coupons for Snickers.

And Whiskas has taken up the baton too. For some reason best known to itself, Whiskas ads were deadly straight, while all around the world was going mad for cat videos.

At last, with Kitten Kollege, it’s having fun. This is a multi-episode YouTube series featuring the young cats at an institute of feline education.

The films are littered (urgh, sorry) with jokes about string theory and a library with titles like ‘Kat 22’ and works by Franz ‘Katka’. And no cats on skateboards. You can just feel the creatives letting go.

And of course there’s Skittles. It has long been the bastard child of the Mars empire, leading the way with inspired lunacy. But it too shows no signs of letting up.

Witness this Canadian pop-up shop where consumers could trade unwanted Christmas gifts for…Skittles. Or Skittles’s link-up with London Gay Pride in which it lent its ‘rainbow’ to the festival and went black-and-white instead – right down to the packaging and the product.

Sadly, this new climate does not seem to extend across the board for Mars products. The Mars Bar bell-ringers are in drastic need of a refresh. Compared to Snickers and Maltesers it feels mediaeval.

Dolmio is getting in on the act with the idea of a chaotic family dinner, but is still a bit off the pace. It needs to kill off those ghastly Italian cartoon characters fast.

This sense that Mars is having fun – and therefore its agencies too – is enormously important, but all too often forgotten. And yes, of course, there are hard commercial motivations underpinning this work.

Whiskas had lost its way digitally, and consumers didn’t understand the particular dietary requirements of kittens. Sales of Skittles plunge over the Christmas period. Mars wanted to reverse that.

The Snickers ‘Hungerithm’ was all about influencing the impulse moment – that point when people decided they were hungry and went into a shop to buy something.

We hear too often that advertising is no fun anymore, that time pressures make for ‘safe’ work, that clients are risk-averse. As a consumer, bombarded by hundreds of messages every day, why would I want to see ‘safe’, risk-averse work? Why would I notice it? I want to see stuff that’s fun.

So thanks, Mars. Why can’t more clients be like you?