In November 2016, Kit Kat partnered with musical.ly and their agency Collab to launch a program to promote the four-day musical #KitKatChallenge, an extension of Anomaly's Chance the (W)rapper campaign that remixed the classic Kit Kat jingle. It was the first brand integration for musical.ly with an iconic chocolate brand, and non-beverage CPG brand.
The goal of the program was for The Hershey Company to test how one of their lead brands could leverage a rising, innovative platform to further connect with the young millennial/gen z audience, enhance their consumer comms strategy, generate owned learnings, and apply those insights towards the rest of their brand portfolio.
Kit Kat and musical.ly are a natural fit. Kit Kat's audience is passionate about music, rabid creators & consumers of social content, and over-index as first movers on new social platforms.
To execute the campaign, musical.ly's creative agency, digital talent network and entertainment studio Collab, coordinated with the brand and their creative agency Anomaly to create a four-day campaign that commenced on Thanksgiving Day. The team specifically chose the Thanksgiving time-frame because it's a heavy traffic time for the app, with the brand's target off for the holidays and looking for ways to entertain themselves.
Collab worked with Anomaly to identify two influencers that appeal to the Kit Kat target, and possess the comedic timing and cultural impact to launch the idea: fashionista Allicattt (2.6M), and parody master Bart Baker (4.6M).
Allicattt and Bart were tasked with sparking the #KITKATCHALLENGE by creating humorous call-to-action videos encouraging users to take a break, and show off their own original take on the Kit Kat jingle sung by Chance The Rapper. Tens of thousands of users generated funny and clever videos over the holiday, from work-out breaks to family skits.
The #KitKatChallenge surpassed metric goals, garnering over 96 million campaign views, and the following cumulative results:
- 60,000 total challenge submissions on musical.ly, exceeding the campaign team's goal by 20,000 videos
- 1.6 million views on sponsored videos
- 21.7 million views on challenge submissions
- 26.2 million non-video impressions, including views of trending tag page, custom challenge page, and Kit Kat's song by Chance the Rapper
- It was the most successful brand campaign that ran on musical.ly for less than 7 days.
