M&M's Puts Its Spokescandies in a Crime Drama, a Telenovela, and a Reality Show
The candy brand's new "Screentime" campaign casts its mascots across three overplayed TV genres, and the joke works because the punchline never changes: someone always wants to eat them.
M&M's has spent a year building a tagline, "It's more fun together," and its new campaign finally asks what that phrase looks like across three different remotes.
"Screentime," built with BBDO Chicago, drops the spokescandies into three parodies: a crime-procedural cold open where a detective surveys chalk outlines of candy before announcing he will "eat the green one," a telenovela where a smoldering lead's confession of love is actually a confession of appetite, and a reality competition called "Unanimous" where castaways voted off the island simply become snacks. Each spot lands on the same beat: four M&M's on a couch against a yellow backdrop, waiting to be eaten.
The genre-hopping is the strategy, not the joke. M&M's has spent the past couple of years attaching itself to whatever the culture is already watching, tie-ins with "Practical Magic 2," "Love Island USA," and Marvel among them, and "Screentime" is the format-agnostic version of that same instinct: instead of picking one show to ride, it borrows the visual grammar of three at once. It is a candy brand admitting its mascots are more famous than most of the actors in the genres they are spoofing.
The risk is that genre parody ages the way memes do, which is to say badly and fast. A telenovela joke and a true-crime joke both assume the audience is fluent in prestige-adjacent television tropes that shift year to year. But for a campaign running across broadcast, full-episode players, programmatic, and social, familiarity is the point: nobody needs a media literacy class to get that the candy is the punchline, in every genre, every time.
Source: Marketing Dive
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
