If you live in the United States in a place where you are subjected to advertisements, then you have seen the recent Snickers® ad campaign. I started seeing the ads on billboards and buses a few months ago, and they frustrated me immensely. My first reaction was one of disgust, as I saw word after legitimate English word get mangled by the churning gears of some ad agency’s marketing machine. Peanutentiary? Hungerectomy? I failed to make the connection between jail time, surgery, and candy bars, and hated the ads more each time I saw them.
After weeks of yelling at billboards from my car, I decided I needed a new coping method. So, like any upstanding designer would do, I made my own versions. I decided that if these things were going to exist in the world, I would have to take it upon myself to create more of them, and make them awful. They had to be bad, but not just tryin’-to-be-clever bad. They had to be so bad that they were good. So here’s what I came up with.
So there you go. I’ve got a couple other ones that I’ll add if I get around to it, but those are my top three right now. I realize that “Menougatrois” is a bit of a stretch to read, but I still like it. I wish the typeface were better — all I could find when I was making these was a sloppy approximation of the Snickers® typeface that I pulled from DaFont. It does the trick, I suppose, but some of the characters bother me.
Anyhow, making these was a ton of fun. And after talking about it with my wife, she made me realize that the just-for-fun, non-sequitur element of this whole campaign is what actually makes it kinda good (!). I mean, not once in any of the ads are Snickers or candy bars even mentioned, and yet you know that’s exactly what they’re about. Pretty solid. I still think mine might sell more product (especially in Seattle), but I suppose the world will never know.
Well, that’s all for now. If I get around to polishing up the other ideas I have for these, I’ll post ‘em. Until then, I guess you should go eat a Snickers®. But do it dirty.
Update: So I was just kickin’ around online and I found this guy’s blog, which I promise I had not seen prior to posting this. It’s kinda eerie. Check it out: http://www.wiggz.com/blog/art/snickers-ad-parodies/


















