The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2024
Snickers clones José Mourinho in AI so fans can roast each other's own goals
An authorised AI Mourinho on WhatsApp roasted your mate's 'own goal' — 444M earned impressions and two Grand Clio Sports.
Snickers (Mars Wrigley) · T&Pm
What it had to solve
Snickers' UK market share had declined since 2019, most sharply among younger consumers, and Mars Wrigley wanted the brand inside football culture rather than around it. Research told the agency T&Pm that 7 in 10 football fans found online banter more exciting than the football itself, and that fans spend nearly half their media time in private, ad-free spaces like WhatsApp. The answer was to become part of the banter.
How it works
Snickers' UK market share had fallen since 2019, especially among younger consumers, and the brand's long-running 'You're not you when you're hungry' platform needed a new way into football. Ahead of Euro 2024, agency T&Pm saw that fans had moved the game's best content into private WhatsApp groups, where a tournament sponsor could not buy its way in — so Snickers decided to be invited instead.
The campaign recruited José Mourinho and cloned him with permission: OpenAI wrote the scripts, ElevenLabs voiced them and Synch Labs generated the video, trained on his post-match interviews. Fans sent a friend's name and their 'own goal' to a web app or WhatsApp bot and received a personalised video of Mourinho roasting the mistake and suggesting a Snickers. An eight-stage safety pipeline, red-teaming, a 5,000-word glossary of banned terms and human review with Mourinho's own team kept the tool from producing anything unsafe.
The results made the case for personalised AI. Dwell time on the brand averaged over two minutes against 1.3 seconds of typical social engagement, each video was rewatched or reshared three times on average, and the campaign generated 444 million earned media impressions — larger than the Champions League final audience. In December 2024 it took two Grand Clio Sports awards, for Branded Entertainment and Content and for Social Media.
Why it lands
- It went where the audience actually talked — private WhatsApp — instead of buying tournament sponsorship.
- An authorised clone of a beloved coach let the brand roast people without being the one doing the roasting.
- Every video was personalised to a real person, so forwarding it was the point, not a side effect.
- The safety architecture was the enabler: it let the idea stay edgy without becoming a legal or reputational risk.
What it did
Average dwell time on the brand passed two minutes, against a typical 1.3 seconds of social engagement, and each generated video was watched three times or more through organic sharing. The campaign logged 444 million earned media impressions — more than the Champions League final's audience — and in December 2024 it won two Grand Clio Sports awards, for Branded Entertainment and Content and for Social Media.
What you can take
Make the message the fans' own, not the brand's: personalisation turns banter into sharing, but an AI stunt only scales if safety is engineered as seriously as the fun.
Since then
The project became a reference point for authorised celebrity AI. Most people who generated one video made another, and the campaign's blend of three AI engines with human oversight was written up across the industry as a template for brand-safe deepfakes. It fed Snickers' stated ambition to become the number-one confectionery brand for football fans by the end of 2025, and the two Grand Clio Sports awards placed T&Pm's experiment at the centre of the debate about how talent and brands could use AI without losing control of either.
Sources
- Snickers Hires AI Powered José Mourinho to Personally Sort Out Footie Fan's Own Goals
- How Snickers Cloned José Mourinho and Won 2 Grand Clios
- Clio Sports Reveals 2024 Grand Clio Winners for Excellence in Sports Marketing
- Snickers: Mate Scored an Own Goal?
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