Hershey’s Find Our Happy Place With “Back to School”

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Hershey’s Kisses tap into one of the special moments generations share in this week’s sweet, emotional and highly effective Ad Of The Week. Created by The Martin Agency, “Back To School” is part of the current wider Hershey’s brand campaign “It’s Your Happy Place” which kicked off at the start of the year.

“It’s Your Happy Place” is all about linking Hershey’s with comfort, everyday happy moments and positive emotion. Most of all, it’s about finding the joy in daily life, and the ads take a naturalistic approach, capturing an ordinary but powerful moment on screen.

In “Back To School”, that moment is a conversation between a mom and daughter – the little girl isn’t thrilled at the prospect of going back to school. So Mom remembers the way her own mom used to handle it – calming her down with a squeeze of the hands and a cuddle before giving her a kiss (a Hershey’s Kiss, of course). “Just one kiss?” asks the daughter, and they share the joke before she gets happily on the bus.

It’s a lovely, short ad, packing plenty of emotion into its thirty seconds. And the ad works so well because of its skilful use of two elements we know are linked with long-term brand-building impact.

The first is between-ness, the way a relationship and connection between who characters is created on screen via non-verbal communication like looks and gestures as well as through dialogue. Here we get looks and touches – as well as giving the all-important Hershey’s Kisses candy – to convey the tenderness between mother and daughter, as well as the Mom’s relationship with her own Mom when she was a girl.

And that’s the second powerful element Hershey’s are using here. The section of the ad where the Mom remembers her own girlhood is shot in soft-focus with nostalgic, era-appropriate hairstyles and looks. References to the past and nostalgia in general are hugely important emotional triggers, especially when advertising something like candy that we all enjoyed in childhood.

Combine between-ness and a sense of the past and you have an ad that transcends its simple story to represent a truly special moment and resonate strongly with viewers. Candy is a highly competitive category with a high average Star Rating on our Test Your Ad platform, yet “Back To School” manages to land in the top 4% of all US Candy ads. It lands a near-maximum score of 5.6-Star Rating, predicting exceptional long-term business impact, and also gets an Exceptional short-term Spike Rating.

At System1 we know that showmanship – giving your audience something that entertains and moves them – is the key to powerful, brand-building work. Rather than lean into special effects and celebrity spots, Hershey’s are choosing to use showmanship in a different, gentler way,

celebrating quiet moments rooted in the everyday. “Back To School” shows how special this approach can be.