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“You’re not you when you’re hungry” – but if the entire internet is out of sorts, you could score a high-value coupon for a candy bar.

After an introductory run in Australia last year, the makers of Snickers bars have brought their “Hungerithm” online tool to America. The clever creation aims to monitor the overall mood of internet users at any given time. And the worse that mood gets, the bigger discount you can get on a Snickers.

“The internet gets a little ‘hangry’ when it’s hungry, turning people into their less-desirable selves,” the Mars candy company announced. “Now Snickers can help satisfy in real time.”

If you visit www.Hungerithm.com, you’ll see the current “mood of the internet”, updated every ten minutes. It’s based on an algorithm that analyzes the content of thousands of social media posts, checking them against a list of 3,000 mood-determining words and phrases to capture a snapshot of how people are feeling.

If people’s posts seem generally laid-back, the internet might be declared “mellow”. If people are complaining and upset, the internet is branded “furious”.

And the angrier other people are, the happier you might end up. At any time, you can click a link on the website to get a digital coupon for Snickers that can be used at any 7-Eleven convenience store. The worse the overall mood, the higher the value of the coupon. A completely subdued internet might get you a coupon for a mere 8 cents off. An internet that’s outraged out of its collective mind could get you a coupon worth up to $1.13.

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A Snickers bar retails for about $1.25, give or take, so depending on the pricing at your local 7-Eleven, you could end up with a coupon that will get you a Snickers bar for pennies – or for free.

The promotion is based on Snickers’ well-known “You’re not you when you’re hungry” ad campaign. Being hungry makes you angry (or “hangry”) – so the ad campaign encourages you to have a Snickers to get back to your real self. And with the Hungerithm, if fellow internet users aren’t feeling quite themselves, you can cash in with a big discount on your next Snickers bar.

The Hungerithm was created by an Australian ad agency, and was launched Down Under in the summer of 2016. It won a number of awards for its creativity, and produced results, too – Mars reports that Snickers sales jumped by 67%, with 6,600 coupons redeemed during the five-week campaign.

The American version of the campaign is aiming for a much larger audience, so expect many more coupons to be redeemed before the promotion ends on December 22nd. Once you activate a Hungerithm coupon on a mobile device, you’ll get a link to a bar code that must be used within an hour.

Of course, leave it to couponers eager to score a good deal, to try to game the system. In Australia, some Snickers fans tried to figure out what words were on the list of 3,000, and joined together to use as many of the angriest words as they could on social media. That, theoretically, would cause coupon values to spike as a direct result of their efforts – but only if their posts happened to be among those analyzed by the Hungerithm.

So there’s no telling whether their plan actually worked. But with the coupon value updated 144 times a day, or more than 5,000 times over the course of the campaign, you’re bound to score a good deal eventually.

No one wants to be in a bad mood during the holiday season. But as long as the internet is moody, if only for a moment, you might find that Snickers – or coupons for Snickers – really do satisfy.

One Comment

  1. that’s great, but we don’t have 7-11s in our area. not sure there are any in PA.

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