Nougats of wisdom

Snickers' latest campaign, Snacklish, heads out into the world today, hitting out-of-home, broadcast and Facebook. Snickers sources say that in tough economic times, the #1 candy bar in the world is in the unique position in that it doesn't feel it competes with off-brand products in the same way cereals, detergents and other white-goods do.

Unfortunately, we've already discovered a bit of a shortfall. If you Google certain words that pop up in the campaign's ads like "nutlegience" as in "pledge your nutlegience," you will not find anything. Even if you spelled it "correctly" with an "a." Nothing?! (Except maybe this blog.) As consumers are more and more conditioned to think in terms of search words, it seems that Snickers should at least have the words in their unique word-driven campaign lead their fans to their site, their retailers or at least to other fans.

But it is just Day One. And it is a fun idea that's easy to grasp and play along with. But will consumers caramel?

Editor's note: As we dug a little deeper it seems like the online component of the campaign may be intentionally almost totally user-driven. It's the only logical conclusion, given the creative firepower behind it. Maybe Snickers is trying some sort of simple Web experiment to see if the words and word creation can be soaked up into the vernacular by bloggers, Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia and the like. Still seems like they should have greased the skids a little. Without some web legs, this campaign may be remembered best as a grammatical parlor trick. And a missed opportunity.