A Seven Second Scare Breaks Records for M&M’s

Spooky Season! When the ghouls and ghosts and candy brands come out to play. Halloween is the beginning of candy’s biggest US sales season and naturally brands want to mark the occasion. And they want to go where the customers, parents and partiers go, which means an emphasis on vertical shortform media.

As our latest study, The Long And The Short (Form) Of It shows, though, the format can hold its own terrors for marketers. It’s a medium where brand-owned content underperforms compared to creator-driven content and one where initial attention (and recognition – what we call Fast Fluency) is all important. To effectively navigate the haunted house of shortform digital video, you need strong, upfront branding and creative that triggers emotional response. And you only have seconds to do it.

So it’s no wonder that the Test Your Ad norms for US Digital Video are on the scary side, with only a 2.2-Star average score for long-term effectiveness, and no ads in our database yet hitting the Exceptional 5-Star level. But here come M&M’s with an ad which comes the closest yet, landing a 4.9-Star Rating, and doing it in only seven seconds!

The ad finds the Yellow and Brown M&M’s watching a scary movie. What’s scary to an M&M? A hand coming to pick them from the bag – but instead of a hand it’s a demonic claw! Nope, says the Brown M&M, and firmly pulls the plug on the film. Close with a product shot and a picture of all the mascot Spokescandies.

The Spokescandies are the not-so-secret ingredient that makes this ad succeed. Creative consistency allied with early fluent branding are helpful for vertical video ads, where attention quickly falls off. With these familiar characters M&M’s have that nailed from the start – no need to spend time establishing the brand when everyone knows the living examples of it. As well as its extremely strong Star Rating M&M’s also get Exceptional scores in Spike Rating and in Fast Fluency, putting them easily in the top 5% of digital ads in all three of our main measures.

Not everyone has a set of assets like the Spokescandies, but for brands who don’t have decades of investment in characters to draw on the ad also holds some great lessons. Even though it’s only six seconds long, M&M’s ad still has a three-act storytelling structure, with setup (the movie), conflict (the fearsome claw) and resolution (Ms. Brown pulling the plug). Each beat is visually simple and quickly understood, which means in our Test Your Ad Digital results the whole ad holds almost the entire audience’s attention. Storytelling at six seconds? M&M’s show it doesn’t have to be scary.