Campaigns

Have AI Break, Have A KitKat 

KitKat

Chocolate brand prompts AI chatbot with its iconic tagline to show that even the advanced tech benefits from having a break

Nestlé-owned KitKat in Canada has found yet another way to deliver on its iconic ‘Have a Break’ tagline, this time using the tool of the moment: artificial intelligence chatbots.

In January 2024, the brand released a digital spot that demonstrated that an AI’s level of accuracy increases when asked to have a rest before answering a query. The campaign was informed by a study by Google DeepMind which found that ‘AI is more accurate when you ask it to take a breather,’ just like humans tend to be. 

KitKat tasked the AI chabot with several tasks, and then compared what happened when it included the words ‘Have a break, and then’ as part of the prompt. ​​​​​​​According to the brand, the chatbot’s accuracy when asked to summarise Twelfth Night went from 56% to 78% after being prompted to have a break before answering.

The Have AI Break, Have A KitKat was created by Courage, Toronto.The campaign follows another campaign from Wunderman Thompson Australia in Sydney in 2023 where it takes an AI model to write scripts and used DALL-E 2 to generate the imagery for a campaign so that the brand and its agency partners could ‘have a break’. 

Results / According to the agency, during the first week, the campaign racked up 9 million organic earned impressions with no paid media behind it. In total, the campaign got over 3.5 billion organic impressions.

The campaign boosted Kit Kat’s social engagement by 18% and increased brand love by 250%. The campaign was also shared by influential voices in the tech and AI community (such as Allie K Miller), university professors and Google employees. 

Update 30/4/2024: To find out more about the strategy behind the campaign, we spoke with the team at Nestlé Canada and Courage. You can read our interview here.

Contagious Insight 

Cultural Fluency / Here, KitKat has integrated its brand message into the widespread conversation about AI, aligning its brand’s timeless message of relaxation with the current zeitgeist.

In our interview about the Nestlé brand’s previous Have a Bite Australian campaign, the agency team behind the work revealed that KitKat’s strategy to maintain its salience is by connecting to cultural moments.

Angela Morris, chief strategy officer at Wunderman Thompson Australia, said: ‘One of the challenges the brand has given us is to keep KitKat relevant and we do that by trying to connect to culture whenever we can. It’s an objective that isn’t solved by one campaign, it’s a continuous process. You need to do repeat actions to maintain that relevance and stay salient.’

This latest AI-focused campaign followers the same strategy, this time by tapping into the cultural interest in generative AI. 

For the long haul / This campaign brings fresh life to KitKat's steady messaging.

KitKat has been encouraging people to ‘have a break’ with its tagline for 85 years. If everyone is now familiar with the cheeky suggestion, the tagline’s endurance is as much a challenge as it is an asset. For companies with long-standing brand platforms such as KitKat, coming up with creative ideas to keep its positioning fresh can be tricky. How do you breathe new life into something people have heard about a thousand times and make it engaging?

This campaign is one answer to that: the brand found a very contemporary medium to reiterate its message – that taking a break is essential – by showing that even cutting-edge technology like AI works better after a pause. This not only reinforces everything KitKat has worked long and hard to build over decades, it also modernises it – positioning the chocolate brand within that narrow space between legacy and modernity.

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