Playing on the double-sticked nature of the product, Twix in the Nordics pulled a modern—and more discomfiting—version of Doublemint's "Double Your Pleasure."
Patchwork Group in Denmark helped prep the campaign, which will run in all Nordic nations. In the video, unsuspecting café patrons sit down at a table and immediately start to notice something slightly off.
They are surrounded by various sets of twins.
In the best of times, this is probably pretty odd, but at worst you might just think you've wandered into a twin café (weirder things exist, after all). The twinsiness is emphasized, however, to a maddening degree: Each pair is wearing the same clothes and doing the exact same thing. Behind the counter are two matching baristas. At the bar, two twin girls take a selfie at exactly the same time. Elsewhere, two blond men in suits sip from their coffee and flip newspaper pages in tandem. And at the window, two phones ring—and their owners say "Hello?" simultaneously.
Some victims laugh gamely; others look visibly uncomfortable. One guy follows every movement with his eyes, a growing suspicion of foul play dawning on his face.
Matched with playful tango music, it's at once funny and Shining-level creepy, which is as good a reason as any to use this GIF that's been hanging out in our files for a while:
The video, directed by Sigurd Bæk and produced by Moland Film Company, is labeled "Coffee with a Twix," lending itself easily to future Punk'd-style efforts by replacing one word with a new scenario.
"Twix already has a strong position in the market, and we would like to ensure this for the coming years," says Laura Rajala from Mars Chocolate, Twix's parent company. "Patchwork's plan for 2016 will add a ton of humor and relevance to Twix, and I am looking forward to seeing how the target group reacts."
We like a good situational gag, but the schadenfreude that stems from watching everybody's faces wears off fast, especially once you realize the ad is missing the bit people usually expect after some hidden-camera action: A satisfying reveal—and, because we're ad people, a coherent product tie-in, which may have been as simple as bringing befuddled patrons a Twix with their check.
Instead, we get a lingering shot of a guy's WTF face, followed by the Twix logo and a cup of coffee with a kooky smile. As that cup splits in two, the tagline appears: "Twice as good."
We can't help thinking it would have been double the pleasure with a payoff, though.