Connect With Your Butterfinger

How Yahoo! helped Butterfinger build a home for its customers online with a comedy video network

Nestlé wanted to connect with its Butterfinger candy bar customers and its comedic heritage online, but it didn’t rely on traditional digital advertising to do it. Instead, it worked with Yahoo! to build a home online for its customers: a video network where they could watch funny videos.

The Challenge
Nestlé wanted to maintain the Butterfinger brand’s comedic heritage while bringing its appeal up-to-date, especially among the candy bar’s core customers. “Humor is part of our brand equity,” says Daniel Jhung, Marketing Manager, Nestlé Butterfinger. “We wanted to get broad reach to our target consumer, align ourselves with them and with the kind of irreverent humor they identify with most.”

The brand wanted to develop a non-traditional, digital approach, one that would create even greater customer engagement with the brand. Butterfinger turned to Yahoo!, which offered them the ability to customize a section of Yahoo! Video with the Butterfinger identity.

The Solution
Rather than a traditional online advertising campaign, Nestlé engaged with Yahoo! to develop the Butterfinger Comedy Network on Yahoo! Video. This exclusive, Butterfinger-branded, audience-driven Yahoo! Video channel gathered thousands of comic videos from Yahoo! users as well as established online comedy mainstays: JibJab.com, Stupidvideos.com, The Onion and FunnyOrDie.com. Since its launch in April, 2008, more than 2,100 videos have been uploaded to the site, making it a Web hub for irreverent comedy. The large Yahoo! network yields millions of page views each month, reaching over 80% of Butterfinger’s primary target audience of young adults on the internet.

The Butterfinger Comedy Network has also become the de-facto home page for the Butterfinger brand. “People go to Butterfinger.com to get nutritional information and other facts,” Jhung says. “We wanted to create a home for consumers.” Butterfinger has ads throughout its network that link to video games and contests designed to get users involved with the brand. For instance, Butterfinger and Yahoo! partnered with Hollywood celebrity, Seth Green (whose credits include “Austin Powers” and “Family Guy”), to create an interactive contest series, “Dude, Where’s My Bar?”

As part of its “Protect Your Butterfinger” ad campaign, the brand worked with Yahoo! to create the Protectyourbutterfingerbar.com contest site, awarding up to $25,000 for the best user-generated “How do you protect your Butterfinger?” video. Videos were shared and embedded on sites and blogs across the Web.

“The contest allows for two-way communication,” notes Jhung. “Our holy grail for engagement is all-waycommunications. The cool thing is that users would submit their videos and talk to each other about the videos with the brand as the centerpiece of the conversation.”

The Results
The Butterfinger Comedy Network successfully improved its perception as a favorable, irreverent, and unique brand among its target visitors. An average of 2.6 million people visited the microsite per month between January and July of 2009 and 42 percent of the audience said they would recommend the site to others. Users viewed an average of 8 million video streams per month.

The campaign showed “significant lifts” in the following key engagement attributes, according
to Nestlé:

• Unique—11 percent.
• Funny—16 percent.
• “Brand for someone like me”—16 percent.

All of these attributes added up to real results: Purchase intent for Butterfinger rose 12.3 percent. The campaign gleaned traction in overall aided brand awareness, sponsorship association, and brand favorability. Butterfinger Comedy Network provides an online home for the brand’s audience, bringing them the humorous content that most resonates
with them.

“The network effect and the broad reach they have to our consumers was a big part of why we engaged with Yahoo!,” says Jhung. “Also, it was a completely customizable solution for our brand. Yahoo! built and hosted it. But we own it. That’s pretty cool.”

And the big winner of the Protect Your Butterfinger video contest? The Butterfinger Phone App by David M.:

—The Yahoo! Advertising Team